cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Need for Speed (and Grace): Issues in a First-Inventor-to-File World

Generally speaking, a patent gives its owner the right to exclude others from making using selling, offering to sell, or importing the invention during the term of the patent. If, however, two or more inventors come up with the same invention and file for a patent, the system needs a way to determine who gets the patent, since only one patent will issue per invention. The United States currently stands alone in awarding the patent to the inventor who can establish the earliest invention date (first to invent or "FTI"). All other countries award the patent to the inventor who wins the race to the patent office and files an application covering the invention first (first inventor to file or "FITF"). Pending patent reform legislation includes a provision that would move the United States to a FITF system. Some argue that the U.S. already has a defacto FITF system because in disputes regarding priority of invention, the first filer normally wins. Also, U.S. inventors who file for patent protection in other countries already have been operating in these FITF systems and have conformed their practices to this reality. Much has been written on the topic of a U.S. move from FTI to FITF and its benefits for global patent harmonization, certainty, and efficiency. However, this paper is being written in conjunction with a symposium on intellectual property and entrepreneurship and in it, I explore potential impacts of a change from FTI to FITF on small entities in the U.S., a class of inventors that includes many entrepreneurs, particularly academic researchers. I believe there are valid arguments for and against each approach, some of which I delineate in the paper. However, my concern is less on the merits of "whether" the U.S. should switch to FITF and more on "when" and under what circumstances the change should happen to be most beneficial to small entity inventors in the U.S. and beyond.
The New Formalism: Requiem for Tiered Scrutiny

Tiered scrutiny developed during the twentieth century to solve the problem of how to mediate the presumed validity of government action and the presumptive primacy of individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As the pace and scope of government regulation of daily life increased during that century, the occasions for conflict between these principles became more frequent. Perhaps for that reason, tiered scrutiny assumed ever-increasing complexity. Intermediate scrutiny joined strict scrutiny and the default level, minimal scrutiny. Debate ensued concerning whether courts should assess the legislature's hypothetical purposes, stated purposes, or engage in a judicial quest for its actual purposes. Rarefied discussion of the relative importance of governmental objectives became a staple of tiered scrutiny, as did fine distinctions concerning the closeness of the fit between the challenged means and the government's objectives. Inevitably, the discussion broadened to include the appropriate method for locating those liberties deemed so fundamental that their invasion by government ought to be treated as presumptively unlawful.
Duality Approaches to Economic Lot‐Sizing Games

Sharing common production, resources, and services to reduce cost are important for not for profit operations due to limited and mission-oriented budget and effective cost allocation mechanisms are essential for encouraging effective collaborations. In this study, we illustrate how rigorous methodologies can be developed to derive effective cost allocations to facilitate sustainable collaborations in not for profit operations by modeling the cost allocation problem arising from an economic lot-sizing (ELS) setting as a cooperative game. Specifically, we consider the economic lot-sizing (ELS) game with general concave ordering cost. In this cooperative game, multiple retailers form a coalition by placing joint orders to a single supplier in order to reduce ordering cost. When both the inventory holding cost and backlogging cost are linear functions, it can be shown that the core of this game is non-empty. The main contribution of this study is to show that a core allocation can be computed in polynomial time under the assumption that all retailers have the same cost parameters. Our approach is based on linear programming (LP) duality. More specifically, we study an integer programming formulation for the ELS problem and show that its LP relaxation admits zero integrality gap, which makes it possible to analyze the ELS game by using LP duality. We show that there exists an optimal dual solution that defines an allocation in the core. An interesting feature of our approach is that it is not necessarily true that every optimal dual solution defines a core allocation. This is in contrast to the duality approach for other known cooperative games in the literature.
Mixed Blessings: The Great Lakes Compact and Agreement, the IJC, and International Dispute Resolution

For scholars of international law and international dispute resolution, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact and Agreement may seem a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they promise environmental cooperation and management of the Great Lakes at an unprecedented scale. The agreements have been heralded as a tremendous advancement in state-provincial relations. On the other hand, international scholars should be nervous for what the agreements signify for international law and dispute resolution. The Compact and Agreement are remarkable for replacing an already functioning regulatory regime: the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, administered by the International Joint Commission (IJC). This Article does not criticize the agreements, but it does lament the reluctance of the United States and Canada to more readily embrace the IJC, * Associate Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School. J.D., Columbia University, 1997; B.A., University of Washington, 1994. The author is the Director of Southwestem's Summer Law Program in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, where he teaches international environmental law at the University of British Columbia. The author is grateful to Noah Hall for his comments and suggestions and to Clinton Hare and Natasha Hill for their research assistance. Michigan State Law Review and the powers granted to it under the Boundary Waters Treaty. The Compact and Agreement move transboundary environmental management and dispute resolution from the international to the sub-national level. By doing so, they likely will further curtail the two countries' use of the IJC. At the very least, the agreements reflect a missed opportunity to reinvigorate, rather than undermine, the IJC. If the IJC has been only marginally effective recently, its shortcomings are a result of U.S. and Canadian national policy. The federal governments have been reluctant to embrace the IJC as an effective bilateral institution. It did not have to be this way. The result, this Article concludes, is unfortunate.
Symposium Introduction: International Law Confronts the Global Economy: Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Democracy in Distress

Law-and-economics conventional analysis contends that franchise termination laws, prohibiting opportunistic termination by the franchisor, are superfluous. Well-rooted in traditional law-andeconomics opposition to such legislation is the belief that the reputation mechanism serves as a sufficient control against opportunistic termination by franchisors. This article questions the idea that reputation concerns can be a substitute for regulation of franchise relationships.
Strategic flexibility and the optimality of pay for sector performance

While standard contract theory suggests that a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) should be paid relative to a benchmark that removes the effects of sector performance, there is evidence that CEO pay is strongly and positively related to such sector performance. In this article, we offer an explanation. We model a CEO charged with selecting the firm's strategy that determines the firm's exposure to sector performance. To incentivize the CEO to choose optimally, pay contracts will be positively and sometimes asymmetrically related to sector performance. Consistent with our predictions, the empirical analysis indicates that the observed sensitivity of pay to sector performance is almost fully confined to multisegment firms and is greater in firms that offer greater strategic flexibility to alter sector exposure, for more talented CEOs and for CEOs as compared to their subordinate executives. Our evidence is robust to alternate explanations such as CEO entrenchment. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org., Oxford University Press.
Trade Policy Determinants and Trade Reform in a Developing Country

In this paper, I start out with a standard political economy of trade policy model to measure the determinants of trade policy in a developing country. I carefully test the model empirically with Colombian data from 1983 to 1998 accounting for endogeneity and omitted variable bias concerns and then expand it in several directions.. I show that it is important to control for the impact of a drastic trade reform shock that affects all sectors and disentangle its effect from preferential trade agreements (PTAs). I find that protection is higher in sectors that are important exports for preferential partners which may be seen as a stumbling effect of PTAs for Colombia. I also relax the assumption of fixed political weights that measure the extra importance of producers’ welfare relative to consumers in the government objective. I measure the impact of sectoral characteristics on tariffs indirectly through political weights as a novel alternative to nonstructurally estimating them as determinants of protection. Accordingly, I obtain more realistic estimates for the political weights further contributing to the literature.
Liquidity: Considerations of a Portfolio Manager

This paper examines liquidity and how it affects the behavior of portfolio managers, who account for a significant portion of trading in many assets. We define an asset to be perfectly liquid if a portfolio manager can trade the quantity she desires when she desires at a price not worse than the uninformed expected value. A portfolio manager is limited by both what she needs to attain and the ease with which she can attain it, making her sensitive to three dimensions of liquidity: price, timing, and quantity. Deviations from perfect liquidity in any of these dimensions impose shadow costs on the portfolio manager. By focusing on the trade-off between sacrificing on price and quantity instead of the canonical price-time trade-off, the model yields several novel empirical implications. Understanding a portfolio manager’s liquidity considerations provides important insights into the liquidity of many assets and asset classes. This paper examines liquidity and how it affects investor behavior, focusing on the considerations of a mutual fund portfolio manager. US mutual funds are the largest investor in US commercial paper with 47%, and they hold 35% of US tax-exempt debt, 27% of US equities, and about 10% of US corporate, Treasury, and agency debt (Investment Company Institute, 2008). Total mutual fund holdings worldwide equaled $26 trillion at year-end 2007. An understanding of the liquidity considerations of a portfolio manager therefore provides important insights into the liquidity of many assets and asset classes. A portfolio manager seeks to optimize the performance of her portfolio relative to her performance benchmarks. In this pursuit, she is limited by both what she needs to attain and the ease with which she can attain it. This makes her sensitive to three dimensions of liquidity: price, timing, and quantity. Deviations from perfect liquidity in any of these dimensions impose shadow costs on the portfolio manager, making them key considerations in her portfolio decisions. Wedefineanassettobeperfectlyliquidifaportfoliomanagercantradethequantityshedesires when she desires at a price not worse than the uninformed expected value. A few examples serve to motivate the three dimensions of liquidity and their shadow costs. Quantity may be the most importantconsiderationforpassiveportfoliomanagers,suchasthosewhoareboundbyprospectus
Uncertainty Aversion and Systemic Risk

We propose a new theory of systemic risk based on Knightian uncertainty (or “ambiguity”). We show that, due to uncertainty aversion, beliefs on future asset returns are endogenous, and bad news on one asset class induces investors to be more pessimistic about other asset classes as well. This means that idiosyncratic risk can create contagion and snowball into systemic risk. Furthermore, in a Diamond and Dybvig (1983) setting, we show that, surprisingly, uncertainty aversion causes investors to be less prone to run individual banks, but runs will be systemic. In addition, we show that bank runs are associated with stock market crashes and ‡ight to quality. Finally, we argue that increasing uncertainty makes the …nancial system more fragile and more prone to crises. We conclude with implications for the current public policy debate on the management of …nancial crisis.
The Real Exchange Rate in Small, Open, Developed Economies: Evidence from Cointegration Analysis

We examine the effects of the terms of trade and the expected real interest rate differential on the real exchange rate in small, open, developed economies. We employ cointegration analysis to search for long-term linkages. We find that while both the terms of trade and the expected real interest rate differentials affect the real exchange rate in the long run, the role of the terms of trade generally proves more consistent. The speed of adjustment for the expected real interest rate differential in the error-correction model, however, is quantitatively larger than it is for the terms of trade.
Speed Variance, Enforcement, and the Optimal Speed Limit

A model of the optimal speed limit is developed which explicitly recognizes the roles of average speed, speed variance, and the level of enforcement. An unusual result emerges, namely that a higher speed limit may be optimal when reducing the variance in highway speeds reduces accident externalities.
Portfolio Rebalancing in General Equilibrium

Abstract This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends on the distribution of wealth, and an intertemporal hedging effect. After a negative macroeconomic shock, relatively risk-tolerant investors sell risky assets, while more risk-averse investors buy them. Owing to interactions of leverage and changing wealth, however, all agents have higher exposure to aggregate risk after a negative macroeconomic shock and lower exposure after a positive shock.
Open Innovation in Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture

Contemporary global order for the promotion of innovation exaggerates the role of intellectual property (IP) as a closed proprietary model of knowledge production and protection. Partly as a boomerang effect of that order and/or partly as a coincidence of the phenomenal rise in the information and communication technologies, there has been increased gravitation toward open, collaborative, shared, communal, and interdependent models of innovation. This trend is typified by the rise of open software movement and cognate endeavors. This Article attempts to transpose the open innovation dynamic to the context of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA); and draws attention to the customary seed sharing and exchange as the centerpiece of the inherent open nature of innovation in agriculture, especially in indigenous and local communities. Focusing on the emergent institutional and legal frameworks for the governance of PGRFA, this Article finds that they reflect pragmatic attempts at melding both the IP-driven closed model and the accommodation of openor public-goods approach toward the promotion of access and overall management of innovation in PGRFA. It concludes that IP is not necessarily antithetical to open innovation, but could be calibrated to advance it.
Capital Flows and Demographics — An Asian Perspective *

This paper calibrates the production functions of 176 countries to fit 2003 data and examines the capital flows that emerge, when labor forces change according to the 2007 UN population projections. It finds that demographic factors are no help in correcting today's global imbalances; that Japan's capital outflows have as much to do with population aging as with the yen carry-trade; and that China is key to understanding Asia's demographic impact on the world. It also finds that Asia offers the greatest arbitrage opportunities worldwide during the demographic transition and has the greatest potential for regional financial integration among world regions. Moreover, the demographic transition is unlikely to result in an asset price meltdown and could even raise world interest rates under perfect capital mobility.
How Often Do Managers Withhold Information

We estimate a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure, using annual management forecasts of earnings, that features a manager with price motives and an uncertain but persistent information endowment....
Assessing the Counterfactual: The Efficacy of Drug Interdiction Absent Racial Profiling

This Article investigates the costs and benefits of racial profiling in the context of drug interdiction. I begin by reviewing the empirical economic and civil rights literature regarding the existence and rationality of racial profiling and then build an explicit model of a trooper’s decision to search a stopped vehicle. Estimating the model using stop and search data from a portion of Interstate 95 in Maryland, I find that the Maryland State Police use the motorist’s race as a factor in deciding which stopped vehicles to search. This result persists even after controlling for many other descriptive variables that impact the trooper’s decision to search. I then introduce an additional model that controls for race’s role in the search decision and estimates the counterfactual: the change in the amount of drugs Copyright © 2005 by Katherine Y. Barnes. † Associate Professor, Washington University School of Law; J.D., University of Michigan Law School, 2000; Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2003. I would like to thank Sam Bagenstos, Lee Epstein, Samuel Gross, Pauline Kim, Richard Lempert, Andrew Martin, Robert Pollack, Margo Schlanger, Nancy Staudt, and seminar participants at Washington University School of Law and the Work, Families, and Public Policy Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this Article. In addition, Deborah Jeon, Elliott Wolf, and Amy Cruice at the ACLU of Maryland and Mark Bowen, assistant attorney general of Maryland, were very helpful in allowing me access to the data. Finally, I would like to thank Cary Hawkins, Jeffrey Wax, and Ken Simpson for their able research assistance. The views expressed in this Article are my own and are in no way endorsed or approved by the ACLU of Maryland or the attorney general of Maryland. BARNES FIG 2 UPDATE 12-2-05.DOC 12/19/2005 3:01 PM 1090 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 54:1089 the police would find if they ignored race as a factor in the search decision. Applying that model, I find that race is the strongest predictor of identifying drug traffickers, but that racial profiling comes at significant cost, as black motorists who are subject to search are also more likely to be innocent than their white counterparts.
Questioning Cultural Commons

In Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment, Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann, and Katherine J. Strandburg offer an innovative and attractive vision of the future of cultural and scientific knowledge through the construction of “cultural commons,” which they define as “environments for developing and distributing cultural and scientific knowledge through institutions that support pooling and sharing that knowledge in a managed way.”1 The kind of “commons” they have in mind is modeled on the complex arrangement of social norms that allocate lobstering rights among fishermen in Maine and extends to arrangements such as patent pools, open-source software development (e.g., Linux), and the modern research university. In this Response, I will pose a series of questions about cultural commons. The first set of questions will interrogate the structure, boundaries, and coherence of the idea of “cultural commons”: that is, I will ask, “What is a cultural commons?” The second set of questions will explore the fundamental assumptions of the case for these institutions: I will ask, “What are the normative foundations for cultural commons?” The third set of questions will inquire into the feasibility of the proposal for cultural commons as a method for governing information: I will ask, “Are cultural commons possible?” These questions are intended to rigorously interrogate the foundational assumptions of the very intriguing proposal offered by Madison, Frischmann, and Strandburg.
It’s Just a Shot Away: MMR Vaccines and Autism and the End of the Daubertista Revolution

This Article predicts the demise of the Daubertista Revolution in science and law. Using the example of the February 2009 Federal Vaccine Court decisions that thoroughly and specifically debunk the belief that childhood measles, mumps, rubella ('MMR') vaccines cause autism, the Article posits that Daubertista hegemony over the field of science and law will and should end because we consistently ignore non-evidence legal cases even when courts engage in sophisticated analyses of vital and complex scientific questions. Other glaring examples discussed in the Article include our almost complete disinterest in science and law in the context of Intelligent Design Theory cases including the ground-breaking science-sentered decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Many cases that do not involve the admissibility of scientific evidence provide insight into how law uses and misuses science and create new (currently neglected) opportunities explore and predict shifts in social and judicial attitudes and behavior. The Article acknowledges that many Daubertistas have made significant contributions to the field, but proposes a new, more inclusive, transdisciplinary approach to both the study and practice of science-based legal controversies. This new approach would begin outside the courthouse with more explicit recognition of shared systemic social obstacles to sound science-based legal decisions in all fields such as: (1) growing American scientific illiteracy; (2) balanced media coverage of all so-called scientific “controversies” from evolution to alien abduction; and (3) effective efforts to exaggerate scientific uncertainty or distort scientific claims to advance theistic, normative, political, or pecuniary objectives. By starting the analysis outside the courthouse, the Article more effectively links traditional Daubertista concerns of evidentiary quality control to more global questions of science, law and society.
Audit Committee Financial Expertise, Litigation Risk, and Corporate Governance

SUMMARY: Recent debates on audit committee financial expertise have focused on “accounting” and “nonaccounting” financial experts. A significant proportion of firms do not appoint accounting financial experts (i.e., persons with specialized accounting/auditing experience) to their audit committees. We examine the determinants of firms' choice of the “audit committee financial experts” for a sample of Fortune 1000 firms. We test the relation between the demand for accounting financial experts (AFEs), potential litigation risk, and corporate governance. We find that firms with higher litigation risk are more likely to have AFEs on their audit committee. However, the association between litigation risk and the likelihood of appointing accounting financial experts occurs for firms with relatively strong governance but not for those with weak governance. Thus, our findings indicate that (1) companies with demand for accounting financial experts—measured by potential litigation risk—seem to be able to secure ac...
An International Rule of Law

The rule of law is almost universally supported at the national and international level. The extraordinary support for the rule of law in theory, however, is possible only because of widely divergent views of what it means in practice. Disparate national traditions posed few problems while operating in parallel, but efforts to promote the rule of law through international organizations have necessitated a reassess ment of this pluralism. This article proposes a core definition of the rule of law as a political ideal and argues that its applicability to the international level will depend on that ideal being seen as a means rather than an end, as serving a function rather than defining a sta tus. Such a vision of the rule of law more accurately reflects the devel opment of the rule of law in national jurisdictions and appropriately highlights the political work that must be done if power is to be chan neled through law.
A Multi-Scale Analysis of 27,000 Urban Street Networks

OpenStreetMap offers a valuable source of worldwide geospatial data useful to urban researchers. This study uses the OSMnx software to automatically download and analyze 27,000 US street networks from OpenStreetMap at metropolitan, municipal, and neighborhood scales - namely, every US city and town, census urbanized area, and Zillow-defined neighborhood. It presents empirical findings on US urban form and street network characteristics, emphasizing measures relevant to graph theory, transportation, urban design, and morphology such as structure, connectedness, density, centrality, and resilience. In the past, street network data acquisition and processing have been challenging and ad hoc. This study illustrates the use of OSMnx and OpenStreetMap to consistently conduct street network analysis with extremely large sample sizes, with clearly defined network definitions and extents for reproducibility, and using nonplanar, directed graphs. These street networks and measures data have been shared in a public repository for other researchers to use.
Modeling electron fractionalization with unconventional Fock spaces

It is shown that certain fractionally-charged quasiparticles can be modeled on D-dimensional lattices in terms of unconventional yet simple Fock algebras of creation and annihilation operators. These unconventional Fock algebras are derived from the usual fermionic algebra by taking roots (the square root, cubic root, etc) of the usual fermionic creation and annihilation operators. If the fermions carry non-Abelian charges, then this approach fractionalizes the Abelian charges only. In particular, the mth-root of a spinful fermion carries charge e/m and spin 1/2. Just like taking a root of a complex number, taking a root of a fermion yields a mildly non-unique result. As a consequence, there are several possible choices of quantum exchange statistics for fermion-root quasiparticles. These choices are tied to the dimensionality [Formula: see text] of the lattice by basic physical considerations. One particular family of fermion-root quasiparticles is directly connected to the parafermion zero-energy modes expected to emerge in certain mesoscopic devices involving fractional quantum Hall states. Hence, as an application of potential mesoscopic interest, I investigate numerically the hybridization of Majorana and parafermion zero-energy edge modes caused by fractionalizing but charge-conserving tunneling.
When Marketing Strategy First Meets Wall Street: Marketing Spendings and Firms' Initial Public Offerings

This article examines the role of marketing in the context of initial public offerings (IPOs), a neglected issue in the extant literature. The results from a large-scale, cross-industry study indicate that firms’ pre-IPO marketing spendings help reduce IPO underpricing and boost IPO trading in the stock market. The econometric models also suggest that these effects are heterogeneous; that is, they are more salient for firms with higher cost reduction efficiency and in markets with a smaller number of historical IPOs. With regard to theory, this research ushers in a greenfield of IPOs, helping build more powerful theories of market-based assets and customer equity. With regard to practice, it builds the case for not cutting marketing before an IPO. Prudent investors may be better able to pick “star” IPOs if they can track pre-IPO marketing spendings and model firm cost reduction efficiency simultaneously. Overall, this article offers fresh implications for the marketing‐finance interface, uncovering brand-new IPO-based reasons that marketing can help create shareholder value.
'How's My Driving?' for Everyone (and Everything?)

This is a paper about using reputation tracking technologies to displace criminal law enforcement and improve the tort system. The paper contains an extended application of this idea to the regulation of motorist behavior in the United States and examines the broader case for using technologies that aggregate dispersed information in various settings where reputational concerns do not adequately deter antisocial behavior. The paper begins by exploring the existing data on How's My Driving? programs for commercial fleets. Although more rigorous study is warranted, the initial data is quite promising, suggesting that the use of How's My Driving? placards in commercial trucks is associated with fleet accident reductions ranging from 20% to 53%. The paper then proposes that all vehicles on American roadways be fitted with How's My Driving? placards so as to collect some of the millions of daily stranger-on-stranger driving observations that presently go to waste. By delegating traffic regulation to the motorists themselves, the state might free up substantial law enforcement resources, police more effectively dangerous and annoying forms of driver misconduct that are rarely punished, reduce information asymmetries in the insurance market, improve the tort system, and alleviate road rage and driver frustration by providing drivers with opportunities to engage in measured expressions of displeasure. The paper addresses obvious objections to the displacement of criminal traffic enforcement with a system of How's My Driving?-based civil fines. Namely, it suggests that by using the sorts of feedback algorithms that eBay and other reputation tracking systems have employed, the problems associated with false and malicious feedback can be ameliorated. Indeed, the false feedback problem presently appears more soluble in the driving context than it is on eBay. Driver distraction is another potential pitfall, but available technologies can address this problem, and the implementation of a How's My Driving? for Everyone system likely would reduce the substantial driver distraction that already results from driver frustration and rubbernecking. The paper also addresses the privacy and due process implications of the proposed regime. It concludes by examining various non-driving applications of feedback technologies to help regulate the conduct of soldiers, police officers, hotel guests, and participants in virtual worlds, among others. Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=899144 Keywords: Driver distraction; Language: en
Is the Impact of Health Shocks Cushioned by Socioeconomic Status? The Case of Low Birthweight

This paper examines the long-term effects of low birthweight (LBW) on educational attainments, labor market outcomes, and health status using data from the National Child Development Study. The study has followed the cohort of children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 through age 33. We pay particular attentionto possible interactions between LBS and socio-economic status (SES), asking to what extent the deleterious effects of LBW are mitigated by higher SES. We find that LBW has significant long-term effects on self-reported health status, educational attainments, and labor market outcomes. However, there is little evidence of variation in the effects of LBW by SES. An important exception is that high SES women of LBW are less likely to report that they are in poor or fair health than other LBW women.
Market Reaction to Mandatory Nonfinancial Disclosure

We examine the equity market reaction to events associated with the passage of a directive in the European Union (EU) mandating increased nonfinancial disclosure. These disclosures relate to firms’...
Business Reputation and Labor Efficiency, Productivity, and Cost

Assumed benefits from improved reputation are often used as motives to drive corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Are improved cost efficiencies among these reputation benefits? Cost efficiencies and cost management have become more relevant as revenue streams dry up in these tough economic times. Can a good reputation aid these efforts to develop cost efficiencies specifically when managing labor costs? Prior research hypothesizes that good reputation can create labor productivity and efficiency benefits. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate reputation’s relationship with labor efficiency, labor productivity, and labor cost. Using a sample of highly reputable firms from Fortune’s America’s Most Admired Companies list and a corresponding matched sample of firms, we find that reputation is associated with improved labor efficiency and labor productivity. However, we do not find a significant association between reputation and reduced labor costs. Our study contributes to current research hypothesizing and finding efficiency benefits associated with good reputation. Documenting these potential reputation benefits has important implications for CSR activities and initiatives. It supports recent work that incorporates reputation into a more developed model of the relationship between CSR and performance (Vilanova et al.: 2009, Journal of Business Ethics87, 57–69). This work is useful to businesses and supports strategies focused on “doing well by doing good” and maintaining healthy reputations.
Cost of capital and earnings transparency

We provide evidence that firms with more transparent earnings enjoy a lower cost of capital. We base our earnings transparency measure on the extent to which earnings and change in earnings covary contemporaneously with returns. We find a significant negative relation between our transparency measure and subsequent excess and portfolio mean returns, and expected cost of capital, even after controlling for previously documented determinants of cost of capital.
Global Environmental Constitutionalism: Getting There from Here

Dominant analytical approaches to environmental law exhibit a similar, problematic form: they treat that which should be outcome determining as, instead, outcome determined. This form is most evident and influential in the welfare economic technique of regulatory cost–benefit analysis, which treats all resources – including the monetary value of human lives – as potential means towards seemingly higher yielding ends. In contrast, an environmental constitutionalism, in which certain needs and interests of present and future generations, the global community, and other forms of life are given foundational legal importance, would help to restore conceptual coherence and normative priority to the subjects of environmental law.
Knowledge Sharing and Incentive Design in Production Environments: Theory and Evidence

ABSTRACT: We develop and empirically test a parsimonious model of how specific knowledge and the value of knowledge sharing influence manufacturing plants' incentive design choices. Our results confirm the prediction that increases in the extent of agents' specific knowledge and the value of knowledge sharing are associated with greater (less) reliance on output (input) performance measures. Moreover, consistent with our model's prediction, we find that plants rely more on group‐based (as opposed to individual‐based) output performance measures when the value of knowledge sharing is higher, or the extent of agents' specific knowledge is lower. Finally, consistent with previous research, we find that as output performance measures become noisier, firms rely less on these measures in incentive contracts.
Manipulation, Welfare, and Dignity: A Reply

This essay responds to seven commentaries on my forthcoming essay, Fifty Shades of Manipulation. It offers two general points. The first involves the importance of separating three questions: (1) What is manipulation? (2) What is wrong with manipulation? (3) When might manipulation be justified, notwithstanding the answer to (2)? The second involves the relevance of dignity. We might see dignity as a component of welfare, or we might see it as a wholly independent value. But we will not understand manipulation, or what is wrong with it, if we do not see it at all.
Statistical inference and modelling of momentum in stock prices

The following results are obtained, (i) It is possible to obtain a time series of market data {y(t)} in which the fluctuations in fundamental value have been compensated for. An objective test of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which would predict random correlations about a constant value, is thereby possible, (ii) A time series procedure can be used to determine the extent to which the differences in the data and the moving averages are significant. This provides a model of the form y(t)-y(t-l)=0.5{y(t- l)-y(t-2)}+e(t)+0.8e(r-1) where e(t) is the error at time t, and the coefficients 0.5 and 0.8 are determined from the data. One concludes that today's price is not a random perturbation from yesterday's; rather, yesterday's rate of change is a significant predictor of today's rate of change. This confirms the concept of momentum that is crucial to market participants. (iii) The model provides out-of-sample predictions that can be tested statistically. (iv) The model and coefficients obtained in th...
Decoding the DMCA Safe Harbors

The DMCA is a decade old, which, in Internet time, may well be closer to a century. Although the DMCA safe harbors have helped to foster tremendous growth in web applications in our Web 2.0 world, several very basic aspects of the DMCA safe harbors remain uncertain. These uncertainties, along with the relative lack of litigation over the DMCA in the past ten years, have threatened to undermine the whole purpose of the DMCA safe harbors by failing to inform the public and technology companies of what steps they need to undertake to fall within the safe harbors. In several high profile cases against MySpace, YouTube, and other Internet sites, the clarification of the DMCA safe harbors could prove to be just as important to the Internet as their enactment in 1998. This Essay has attempted to clear up two of the biggest uncertainties regarding the DMCA’s relationship to vicarious liability, and the so-called “red flags” theory of knowledge on the part of the Internet service provider. Specifically, under a proper interpretation of the DMCA, courts should (i) reject the “loophole” theory that posits that the DMCA safe harbors provide no immunity from vicarious liability at all, and (ii) require a high burden for proving a “red flags” theory by requiring knowledge of facts that show specific and “obvious” or “blatant” infringement. This Essay offers five principles for courts and Congress to consider in applying or amending the DMCA safe harbors in the future. The DMCA safe harbors should be made truly “safe” harbors, in a way that encourages greater investment in and the development of speech technologies on the Internet, all while encouraging copyright holders to share the burden of reducing infringement by utilizing the DMCA notice and take-down procedure.
Because I Said So

Political authority is the moral power to impose moral duties upon a perhaps unwilling citizenry. David Enoch has proposed that authority be understood as a matter of “robust” duty-giving. This paper argues that Enoch’s conditions for attempted robust duty- or reason-giving are, along with his non-normative success condition, implausibly strong. Moreover, Enoch’s attempt and normative-success conditions ignore two facts. The first is that success requires that citizens be tolerant of modest errors by the authority, which means that, in conditions of modest error, performing as directed must have a non-instrumental, intrinsic value. The second is that an attempt to exercise authority involves an intention to trigger a moral principle endowing conforming performances with intrinsic value. The mystery of political authority is the mystery of how official directives could possibly suffice to endow conforming performances with intrinsic value.
OPTIONS AND EFFICIENCY IN MULTIDATE SECURITY MARKETS

This paper extends the work of Ross (1976; Q. J. Econ. (90)1, 75–89) to multidate security markets. First, we show that if a primitive security separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating dynamically complete markets. Second, we show that if a primitive security conditionally separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating generically dynamically complete markets provided that certain conditions hold. Third, we show that there are economies for which the minimum number of multiperiod European options on a primitive security generating generically dynamically complete markets is relatively large. Finally, we show that in these economies, a relatively small number of multiperiod European options on possibly different portfolio strategies of primitive securities generates generically dynamically complete markets.
The Invention of Low-Value Speech

It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment does not apply, or applies only weakly, to what are often referred to as “low-value” categories of speech. It is also widely accepted that the existence of these categories extends back to the ratification of the First Amendment: that low-value speech is speech the punishment of which has, since 1791, never been thought to raise any constitutional concern. This Article challenges this second assumption. It argues that early American courts and legislators did not in fact tie constitutional protection for speech to a categorical judgment of its value, nor did the punishment of low-value speech raise no constitutional concern. Instead, all speech—even low-value speech—was protected against prior restraint, and almost all speech—even highvalue speech—was subject to criminal punishment when it appeared to pose a threat to the public order of society, broadly defined. It was only after the New Deal Court embraced the modern, libertarian conception of freedom of speech that courts began to treat high and low-value speech qualitatively differently. By limiting the protection extended to low-value speech, the New Deal Court attempted to reconcile the democratic values that the new conception of freedom of speech was intended to further with the other values (order, civility, public morality) that the regulation of speech had traditionally advanced. Nevertheless, in doing so, the Court found itself in the difficult position of having to judge the value of speech even though this was something that was in principle anathema to the modern jurisprudence. It was to resolve this tension that the Court asserted— on the basis of almost no evidence—that the low-value categories had always existed beyond the scope of constitutional concern. By challenging the accuracy of the historical claims that the Court has used to justify the doctrine of low-value speech, this Article forces a reexamination of the basis for granting or denying speech full First Amendment protection. In so doing, it challenges the Court’s recent claim that the only content-based regulations of speech that are generally permissible under the First Amendment are those that target speech that was historically unprotected. What the history of the doctrine of low-value speech makes clear is that history has never served as the primary basis for determining when First Amendment protections apply. Nor should it today, given the tremendous changes that have taken place over the past two centuries in how courts have understood what it means to guarantee freedom of speech.
Dynamic equilibrium and volatility in financial asset markets

This paper develops and estimates a continuous-time model of a financial market where investors' trading strategies and the specialist's rule of price adjustments are best response to each other. We examine how far modeling market microstructure in a purely rational framework can go in explaining alleged asset pricing anomalies. The model produces some major findings of the empirical literature: excess volatility of the market price compared to the asset's fundamental value, serially correlated volatility, contemporaneous volume-volatility correlation, and excess kurtosis of price changes. We implement a nonlinear filter to estimate the unobservable fundamental value, and avoid the discretization bias by computing the exact conditional moments of the price and volume processes over time intervals of any length.
The Costs and Benefits of Front-loading and Predictability of Immunization

How can the international community save more children’s lives faster and more effectively in the 21st century? This Working Paper analyzes the extent to which “frontloading” and predictable vaccine funding, as proposed by the International Finance Facility for Immunization (IFFIm), is more effective in impacting vaccine coverage than spending vaccine funds equally throughout the lives of projects. The IFFIm is an initiative of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and supported by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Italy, Spain and Norway. An initial IFFIm investment of $4 billion is expected to prevent 5 million child deaths by 2015, and more than 5 million future adult deaths. Using a stylized model, the authors quantify the positive and negative effects of predictable vaccine funds and frontloading, and finds IFFIm’s approach can increase the impact of vaccine coverage by 22%. This is because stable and long-term financing allows vaccine manufacturers and countries to plan for long periods of time, knowing that resources will be available. Front-loading helps to reduce the spread of disease and to immunize large groups of people faster.
Anomalous Minimum and Scaling Behavior of Localization Length Near an Isolated Flat Band

Using one-dimensional tight-binding lattices and an analytical expression based on the Green's matrix, we show that anomalous minimum of the localization length near an isolated flat band, previously found for evanescent waves in a defect-free photonic crystal waveguide, is a generic feature and exists in the Anderson regime as well, i.e., in the presence of disorder. Our finding reveals a scaling behavior of the localization length in terms of the disorder strength, as well as a summation rule of the inverse localization length in terms of the density of states in different bands. Most interestingly, the latter indicates the possibility of having two localization minima inside a band gap, if this band gap is formed by two flat bands such as in a double-sided Lieb lattice.
Remembering Bill Niskanen: pursuing economics as a public science in the service of liberty

This short essay is a memorial piece about William A. Niskanen (13 March 1933–26 October 2011). The essay starts with his time at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, and gives most attention to his contributions to public choice. Especial attention is paid to his Bureaucracy and Representative Government, which opened vast territory for subsequent analytical exploration. A good deal of attention is also paid to his Autocratic, Democratic, and Optimal Government because this work both conveys his interest in comparative constitutional analysis and is useful for illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to this material.