cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Revolving Door for Financial Regulators

We investigate the motivations and effects of financial firms’ hiring of former US financial regulatory employees. The number of top executives with regulatory experience per firm has increased 24% over 2001–15, and hiring is associated with positive average announcement returns and a salary premium. In the quarter after hire, market and balance sheet measures of firm risk decrease significantly and measures of risk management activity increase, especially for hires from prudential regulators, who directly monitor financial firm risk. The absence of this result for unregulated firms and for exogenous shocks to regulatory experience suggests that firms hire ex-employees of their regulators when they perceive a need to reduce risk, consistent with a schooling hypothesis. We find little direct evidence of quid pro quo behavior in regulatory event frequency and fines.
Diversification and the value of internal capital markets: The case of tracking stock

Abstract Diversified firms trade at a discount relative to comparable portfolios of stand-alone firms. One explanation is that these firms have inefficient internal capital markets. We examine the link between firm value and the value of internal capital markets using a new form of corporate restructuring called tracking stock. We present a model that illustrates that the announcement effect of a tracking stock equity restructuring conveys information about the market’s assessment of the value of a firm’s internal capital market. We develop a measure of the profitability of the internal capital market, and we find a strong positive relation between it and tracking stock announcement effects, a finding consistent with our model.
Interdependence Effects of Housing Abandonment and Renovation

This study uses a methodology for analyzing the interdependence effects of abandonment and renovation for profit-maximizing landlords. After using a Prisoners' Dilemma game of abandonment to establish the existence of the interdependence phenomenon between internal rates of return, a Stackelberg framework is employed to model the interdependence effects of abandonment and renovation. The Stackelberg model appropriately defines the timing payoffs of the landlords' operational decisions. This model shows that as long as one landlord does not abandon, the optimal decision for the other landlord is to renovate their property.
Male susceptibility to attentional capture by power cues

Abstract The present investigation explores the possibility that power has increased salience among males but not females. Evidence indicates that stimuli that are self-relevant or related to chronic goals are more likely to capture attention than neutral information. Across three studies we explore the possibility that the premium males place on power influences how they attend to their environment. Consistent with the common belief that power more readily captures their attention, results indicate that males “dwell” longer on power-related cues (Experiment 1) and are more subject to distraction by task-irrelevant power cues (Experiment 2) than are females. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this increased salience has enduring social consequences by increasing the likelihood that males commit power-relevant material to memory.
A simple differentiable programming language

Automatic differentiation plays a prominent role in scientific computing and in modern machine learning, often in the context of powerful programming systems. The relation of the various embodiments of automatic differentiation to the mathematical notion of derivative is not always entirely clear---discrepancies can arise, sometimes inadvertently. In order to study automatic differentiation in such programming contexts, we define a small but expressive programming language that includes a construct for reverse-mode differentiation. We give operational and denotational semantics for this language. The operational semantics employs popular implementation techniques, while the denotational semantics employs notions of differentiation familiar from real analysis. We establish that these semantics coincide.
Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality if individuals' valuation of votes is proportional to their value of changing the outcome. A variety of analysis and evidence suggests that this still-nascent mechanism has significant promise to robustly correct the failure of existing democracies to incorporate intensity of preference and knowledge. The online appendix for "Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalize Democracy" may be found here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2790624.
School Quality and Black-White Relative Earnings: A Direct Assessment

The wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. It has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools. To test this hypothesis, we assembled data on pupil-teacher ratios, annual teacher pay, and term length for black and white schools in the eighteen segregated states from 1915 to 1966. These data are linked to estimated returns to education for Southern-born men from different cohorts and states in 1960,1970, and 1980. Improvements in the relative quality of black schools explain 20 percent of the narrowing of the black-white earnings gap between 1960 and 1980.
“Feel the Warmth” glow: A field experiment on manipulating the act of giving

Abstract We conducted a field experiment with a charitable group to investigate whether giving the donor an option to write a personalized holiday card to the recipient influences giving behavior. Over 1500 households were approached in a door-to-door campaign and randomized to either a treatment group, in which donors were presented with the option to write their own card for the recipient, or a control group, in which donors were not given the option to write their own card for the recipient. We predict that treatment should increase contributions through making the gift more meaningful, but may also decrease contributions by increasing the transaction and social costs of donating. We find evidence in favor of the negative effects of costs from treatment, and no evidence of increased giving. We also observe that our treatment crowds out small donors (donors giving $5 or less).
Does Foreign Portfolio Investment Reach Small Listed Firms

Because investors generally choose to invest in large firms when investing internationally, it is not immediately obvious whether small listed firms would benefit from foreign portfolio investment. A capital infusion of this form could either serve to alleviate constrained capital markets or make large firms stronger, increasing competition and crowding out small firms. In this paper, I examine the impact of foreign portfolio investment on the capital issuance behaviour of small listed firms. I find that foreign portfolio investment (scaled by gross domestic product) is associated with an increased probability of small firm security issuance in all nations, regardless of property rights development. Evidence suggests that the mechanism by which this occurs is a freeing up of capital in domestic markets when large firms utilise foreign investment directly. Long-term debt levels increase in nations where property rights are more developed, suggesting that foreign portfolio investment may reach small firms through the banking channel as well in these nations. The banking channel results, however, are somewhat sensitive to the definition of foreign portfolio investment.
Stock Price, Earnings, and Book Value in Managerial Performance Measures

This paper develops a multiperiod principal‐agent model in which a manager must be given incentives to undertake investments and to exert personally costly effort. Investments are “soft” (e.g., intangible assets) and therefore entail measurement errors for the accounting system as it seeks to separate investments from operating expenditures. This separation is of no concern to the stock market, which draws on its own information about future cash flows resulting from current investments. The firm's stock price, however, reflects all value‐relevant information, parts of which are not incentive relevant. Optimal incentive provisions must combine “forward‐looking” market information with “backward‐looking” accounting information. Under certain conditions, optimal performance measures can be expressed as a weighted average of economic value added (residual income) and market value added.
DEVELOPMENT LENDING AND THE COMMUNITY REINVESTMENT ACT

This Symposium Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Review & Student Publications at Digital Commons @ Western NewEngland College School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Western New England Law Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons @ Western New England College School of Law. For more information, please contact bwest@law.wnec.edu.
Toehold strategies, takeover laws and rival bidders

Abstract Prior to the announcement of a tender offer, the bidding firm is legally allowed to acquire shares in the open market, subject to some limitations. These pre-announcement purchases are known as toeholds. This paper presents a simple model that describes the bidder's optimal toehold acquisition strategy, within an environment that closely parallels the present legal institutions. The model shows that toeholds and bids interact in a complex manner even without the presence of asymmetric information. By examining a simple environment the paper provides a useful alternative hypothesis for tests of other, presumably more complex, models. One of the main implications of our model is that if no competing bidders are expected, no toeholds should be purchased. The paper also demonstrates that the correct specification of an empirical model can be critical. For example, under some parameter values toehold purchases may exhibit a negative cross-sectional correlation with the pre-announcement run up in the stock price. This occurs even though prices are strictly increasing the size of the toehold. Several implications concerning various aspects of merger legislation are considered. For example, we demonstrate that a rule similar to a “fair price” provision has the desirable property that a second bidder arrives and wins if and only if he places a higher value on the target than the initial bidder.
THE TIME‐SERIES PROPERTIES OF AGGREGATE CONSUMPTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE COSTS OF FLUCTUATIONS

The properties of the stochastic process followed by aggregate consumption affect the estimates of the costs of fluctuations. This paper pursues two approaches to modeling consumption dynamics and measuring how much society dislikes fluctuations, one statistical and one economic. The statistical approach estimates the properties of consumption and calculates the costs of having consumption fluctuating around its mean growth. The paper finds that persistence is a crucial determinant of the costs and that the high persistence in the data severely distorts conventional measures. It shows how to compute valid estimates and confidence intervals. The economic approach uses a calibrated model of optimal consumption and measures the costs of eliminating income shocks. This uncovers a further cost of uncertainty, through its impact on precautionary savings and investment. The two approaches lead to costs of fluctuations that are higher than the common wisdom, between 0.5% and 5% of per capita consumption. (JEL: E32, E21, E60)
A Search for X-Ray Counterparts of Gamma-Ray Bursts with the ROSAT PSPC

We search for faint X-ray bursts with duration 10-300 s in the ROSAT PSPC pointed observations with a total exposure of 1.6 × 107 s. We do not detect any events shorter than ~100 s, i.e., those that could be related to the classic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). At the same time, we detect a number of long flares with durations of several hundred seconds. Most, but not all, of the long flares are associated with stars. If even a small number of those long flares, which cannot be identified with stars, are X-ray afterglows of GRBs, the number of X-ray afterglows greatly exceeds the number of BATSE GRBs. This would imply that the beaming factor of gamma rays from the burst should be greater than 100. The nondetection of any short bursts in our data constrains the GRB counts at the fluences to 10-300 times fainter than the BATSE limit. The constrained burst counts are consistent with the extrapolation of the BATSE logN-logS relation. Finally, our results do not confirm the reality of short X-ray flashes found in the Einstein IPC data by Gotthelf, Hamilton, & Helfand.
Why Is Housing Finance Still Stuck in Such a Primitive Stage

Modern financial theory suggests some fundamental modifications to the institutions supporting housing, and yet nothing fundamental has happened to the standard mortgage contract between the homeowner and originator since the long-term fixed-rate self-amortizing mortgage was widely adopted in the United States in the 1930s, replacing the then-standard three-to-fiveyear balloon-payment mortgage (Bartlett 1989; Green and Wachter 2005). The US mortgage industry has maintained this type of mortgage despite the mathematical finance revolution of the second half of the twentieth century, which suggests many important innovations. I. Reasons for Slowness of Innovation in Mortgage Finance There are quite a number of reasons why technology for homeownership has progressed more slowly than in other areas. Experimentation with new mortgage forms is costly since it must deal directly with the broad public, creating costs of publicity, battles with regulators, and risks of lawsuits. The benefits of the experimentation are usually public goods, available to other mortgage originators, so benefits to innovators do not defray the experimentation costs. While financial patents have been awarded in the United States since the 1990s, they are weak because prior art may be impossible to ascertain until after the costly experimentation has gone on long enough to prove the value of the innovation. Experimentation with long-term financial innovations such as mortgages may take a lifetime to prove itself completely.
Regulatory Competition and the Location of International Arbitration Proceedings

Abstract This article examines whether countries that enact new or revised arbitration laws succeed in attracting new arbitration proceedings to be held in the country. Using a panel of countries that enacted new arbitration laws from 1994 to1999, it finds a statistically significant increase in the number of International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) arbitrations held in the countries after enactment. The economic benefit to the countries from the additional proceedings, however, likely is much smaller than some supporters of the laws have asserted.
Contract and Trust in Corporate Law: The Case of Corporate Opportunity

This article examines the relationship of contract and trust theory to the governance and operation of corporations. The author examines these theories first on a general level, then applies them to the doctrine of corporate opportunity as developed in Chancellor Allen's opinion in Cellular Information Systems, Inc. v. Broz.
Enhancing Cultural Competence in Financial Counseling and Planning: Understanding Why Families Make Religious Contributions

14 Introduction Survey data have shown that religion is “the single most important influence in [life]” for “a substantial minority” of Americans (Miller & Thoresen, 2003, p. 25). In addition to religion influencing them, this substantial minority impact their faith communities by contributing significant amounts of money—a “tithe” or 10% of their incomes in many cases and in some cases 15% or more (Dollahite & Marks, 2009). Unfortunately, scholarly research has barely addressed the meanings of these contributions for the givers.
Internal control and management guidance

We examine the relation between internal control quality and the accuracy of management guidance. Consistent with managers in firms with ineffective internal controls relying on erroneous internal management reports when forming guidance, we document less accurate guidance among firms reporting ineffective internal controls. This relation extends to a change analysis, and the impact of ineffective internal controls on forecast accuracy is three times larger when the weakness relates to revenues or cost of goods sold—inputs particularly relevant to forecasting earnings. We conclude that internal control quality has an economically significant effect on internal management reports and thus decisions based on these figures.
Process Improvement, Learning, and Real Options

We use a real-options approach to analyze investments in process improvement. We develop a simple, stochastic model of a firm making investment decisions in process improvement. Our analysis offers several interesting insights into investments in process improvement. First, early investment in process improvement results in valuable knowledge, which helps increase the value of the option to invest in process improvement in future periods. This may motivate a firm to invest in process improvements as early as possible. Second, it may be optimal for a firm to stop investing when such investments do not create enough value in the later stages of the investment horizon. Third, although one would expect the state of a firm's process relative to that of other firms to impact a firm's decision to invest in process improvement, this study finds that the impetus is conditional and identifies these conditions. Finally, in such an environment, the delay of investment in process improvement incurs an opportunity cost for a firm, and we show that the traditional net present value rule must incorporate this opportunity cost and the knowledge-induced change in future option values to lead to a correct investment decision.
Managed process, due care: structures of accountability in health care.

This article examines how legal, political and economic change has produced a new adjudicatory mechanism for resolving disputes between patients and managed care organizations. In 43 states, external review laws allow patients whose claims for care or reimbursement have been denied by MCOs to appeal through a system that uses private judging companies to review the MCO decisions. Most of the claims concern whether a particular treatment is medically necessary, and the external review companies employ a mix of legal and health professionals to make those judgments. In essence, regulation of this critically important aspect of MCOs has been outsourced to a small but growing industry niche, which provides due process lite for patients. The article begins by describing how a substantive standard of deference to medical authority in tort law leaked into and defined process aspects of health law as well. Then, because of the transformation to managed care models for service delivery, the old deference model fell victim to economic constraints. External review laws were enacted as part of the backlash against the abruptness of that transformation. They emerged from political coalitions searching for a new mechanism of accountability for the private sector. Second, the article revisits procedural due process theory, which was a vibrant field of scholarship 25 years ago, but which today is virtually moribund. I describe how external review laws illustrate the use of dispute resolution procedures to achieve accountability and the emergence of accountability as a primary process value. I also argue that a second process value reflected in the new external review systems - deliberativeness - may be of equal or greater significance than the right to a hearing, the traditional flash point for debates about process. Third, I articulate both the link between procedure and regulation, and also the connection between regulation by procedure to theories of governance. Specifically I argue that we can understand the use of adjudicatory process as one technique of governing at a distance, a method through which preferred policies and norms can be advanced indirectly, by non-governmental as well as governmental actors, rather than by direct, command-and-control state policies.
Variability or Moderation? The Effects of Ambivalence on Political Opinions

Prior research theorizes that ambivalence makes opinions about an object unreliable in the sense of being haphazard, unpredictable, or variable. As such, ambivalence is a prominent explanation for seeming nonattitudes in opinion surveys. This study proposes an alternative account of the effects of ambivalence on attitudes. It posits that people who are ambivalent about an issue split the difference between their conflicting considerations by taking a position near the middle of the bipolar opinion scale, which reflects a moderate attitude. I show how the widely-used method of modeling the supposed variability of ambivalent opinions conflates variability and moderation. This problem is addressed by modeling variability and moderation of attitudes separately, without this confound. Using this strategy in analyses involving four datasets and three policy domains, the results show that ambivalence is associated with moderate, not variable, attitudes. Ambivalence does not increase the variability of opinions but, rather, moves them quite predictably toward the middle of the response scale. The results recast our understanding of the effects of ambivalence on political opinions and raise questions about the ability of ambivalence to explain nonattitudes in surveys.
Solving singular control problems using uniform trigonometrization method

This study investigates the application of a recently developed construct, the Uniform Trigonometrization Method (UTM), to the singular control problems in chemical engineering. The UTM involves minimal modifications to the original problem, thereby generating near-singular control solutions that can be used for conceptual design and serve as an alternate to direct techniques like nested and simultaneous approaches. Eight classical singular control problems with known analytical solutions and three complex singular control problems from chemical engineering domain are solved in this study. The results obtained using the UTM for these problems are found to match well with the literature and are of higher resolution as compared to the results obtained using a direct pseudospectral based solver. The ability of the UTM to handle complex chemical engineering problems with both singular controls and state path constraints has also been demonstrated in this study.
The 100‐Calorie Semi‐Solution: Sub‐Packaging Most Reduces Intake Among The Heaviest

This study addresses two questions about sub-packaging: (i) Do 100-calorie packages reduce the calorie intake of overweight individuals differently than normal-weight individuals? (ii) Do they enable individuals to accurately track intake? Thirty-seven undergraduates were randomly given either four 100-calorie packages of crackers or one 400-calorie package of crackers to eat while watching television. The average participant ate 25.2% (75.1 calories) less when given four 100-calorie packages of crackers than when given one 400-calorie package (P = 0.006). In addition, much of this influence was driven by overweight participants whose intake decreased by 54.1%. However, all of the participants underestimated their consumption by 60% or more, indicating that sub-packaging does not appear to increase one's accuracy in estimating how much is consumed. Smaller sized sub-packaging most greatly benefits those who are overweight, yet it does so without making people more aware of how much they have eaten.
Engaging Stakeholders through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations are Getting More Out of 140 Characters or Less

Abstract While it may seem difficult to communicate in a meaningful manner with 140 characters or less, Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to engage stakeholders not only through their tweets, but also through other various communication methods. Specifically it looks into the organizations utilization of tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, public messages, retweets, and multimedia files. After analyzing 4655 tweets, the study found that the nation's largest nonprofits are not using Twitter to maximize stakeholder involvement. Instead, they continue to use social media as a one-way communication channel as less than 20% of their total tweets demonstrate conversations and roughly 16% demonstrate indirect connections to specific users.
Dynamic Bertrand and Cournot competition: Asymptotic and computational analysis of product differentiation

We study continuous time oligopolies in which a small number of firms producing similar goods compete with one another by setting prices or quantities. We study a deterministic version of the problem using an asymptotic expansion of the relevant HJB partial differential equations. We find in this setting that for firms with highly differentiated goods, the type of competition matters little. For less differentiated goods, we find that the Cournot type market produces a greater value to the firms than the Bertrand type market. We then study a stochastic version of the two games using numerical techniques. This allows us to compare firms with a greater degree of product differentiation. The value is still greater to firms in most scenarios in a Cournot market, but in some situations the classical Bertrand–Cournot dichotomy is reversed.
Exporting U.S. Criminal Justice

In the years leading up to and following the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government embarked on a new legal transplant project, carried out through the foreign promotion of U.S. criminal justice techniques, procedures, and transnational crime priorities. Over the course of the 1990s, U.S. foreign criminal justice development initiatives rapidly expanded. This Article seeks to answer two questions, which to date remain largely unaddressed in the relevant scholarly literatures: Why, in the Cold War’s wake, when the U.S. criminal justice system had come to be viewed in significant respects in terms of failure, did U.S. criminal law development programs take shape and proliferate? What have been the associated outcomes? This Article illustrates how U.S.-sponsored foreign criminal justice reform has functioned in the post-Cold War period as a mode of U.S.dominant “global governance through crime” whereby various global social concerns have come to be regulated in terms of transnational crime control, criminal law, procedure, and punishment. Yet, following two decades of reform, there is no evidence that U.S. criminal justice development assistance has achieved its professed aims of increased stability, efficiency, and prosperity, because, among other limitations, internal evaluative frameworks substitute means for ends, and otherwise neglect to meaningfully explore the impact of ongoing efforts. Competing accounts of project outcomes in Central America, the region most intensively and longest targeted for reform, suggest that at best U.S. criminal justice assistance has been ineffective on its own terms, and that it may have exacerbated inter-personal harms and legal systemic dysfunction (analogous to that of the U.S. criminal justice system) in recipient states. In any case, U.S. foreign criminal justice assistance remains un-transparent, unaccountable, and disconnected from enabling concrete improvements to human welfare. Ultimately, this Article proposes that the lessons learned from this experience ought to attune criminal justice administration to the role of resource distribution and social inequality in constituting crime and
Goodyear and Hertz: Reconciling Two Recent Supreme Court Decisions

II. GOODYEAR AND THE “ESSENTIALLY AT HOME” TEST: WHAT DOES IT MEAN? 867 A. General Personal Jurisdiction Pre-Goodyear 869 B. Goodyear and the “Essentially at Home” Test 873 C. Goodyear Aftermath 875
The Truth-Justice Tradeoff: Perceptions of Decisional Accuracy and Procedural Justice in Adversarial and Inquisitorial Legal Systems

Two studies provide empirical support for Thibaut and Walker’s (1978) theory that inquisitorial and adversarial dispute resolution systems are associated with different psychological values: the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of justice. Study 1 suggests that, in civil and criminal disputes, the adversarial system is perceived to produce less truth than it does justice, and less truth than does the inquisitorial system. Conversely, the inquisitorial system is perceived to produce less justice than it does truth, and less justice than does the adversarial system. Study 2 examines how legal outcomes moderate litigants’ perceptions of the truth and justice produced by these dispute resolution systems. Study 2 suggests that perceptions of the truth and justice provided by the adversarial system are highly sensitive to the outcome of the dispute, whereas perceptions of the truth and justice provided by the inquisitorial system are not affected by dispute outcomes. Implications for Thibaut and Walker’s theory are discussed.
Patentee Overcompensation and the Entire Market Value Rule

A. An Economic Model of Patentee Compensation 1. A benchmark royalty level 2. Deriving a benchmark royalty level for an entire complex device 3. Two conditions for benchmark level compensation 4. Measuring patentee overcompensation B. Consequences of Patentee Overcompensation 1. Decreased incentive for investment in beneficial activities 2. Royalty stacking 3. Increased incentive for patent trolling 4. Overvaluation as a patent infringement deterrent C. Predictability and Ease of Administration III. The Entire Market Value Rule and Complex Electronic Devices:
Rejections and the importance of first response times

Previous studies about the academic publishing process consider the publication delay as starting from the submission to the publishing journal. This ignores the potential delay caused by rejections received from previous journals. Knowing how many times papers are submitted prior to publication is essential for evaluating the importance of different publication delays and the refereeing process cost, and can improve our decisions about if and how the review process should be altered, decisions that affect the productivity of economists and other scholars. Using numerical analysis and evidence on acceptance rates of various journals, estimates that most manuscripts are submitted between three and six times prior to publication. This implies that the first response time (the time between submission and first editorial decision) is much more important than other parts of the publication delay, suggesting important policy implications for editors and referees.
Globalization of Law Firms: A Survey of the Literature and a Research Agenda for Further Study

The international expansion of law firms plays a critical role in understanding the business of law and the nature of globalization. This article responds to the articles by Carole Silver and Len Bierman and Michael Hitt on law firm expansion in this symposium issue on the Globalization of the Legal Profession. The essay utilizes management studies' theoretical work on internationalization and applies it to law firm expansion to explain law firm strategic decision-making. The author creates a six-part taxonomy for types of law firm expansion and provides a snapshot of the increasing U.S./U.K. dominance of capital markets, corporate and mergers & acquisitions legal work around the world. Finally, the article proposes an interdisciplinary research agenda that incorporates law, economics, sociology, economic geography, and management studies to more fully understand law firm expansion.
The Constitutional Limit of Zero Tolerance in Schools

With the introduction of modern zero tolerance policies, schools now punish much more behavior than they ever have before. But not all the behavior is bad. Schools have expelled the student who brings aspirin or fingernail clippers to campus, who does not know that a keychain knife in his backpack, or who reports having taken away a knife from another student in order to keep everyone safe. Despite challenges to these examples, courts have upheld the suspension and expulsion of this good-faith, innocuous behavior. With little explanation, courts have opined that the Constitution places no meaningful limit on the application of zero tolerance policies. Indeed, courts have been so dismissive of constitutional challenges that most scholars all but concede the constitutionality of zero tolerance, arguing instead that schools should voluntarily adopt policy changes. This is incorrect. Although the constitution confers significant discretion on schools to regulate student behavior, that discretion does not include the authority to entirely strip students of their constitutional rights and punish them for any reason a school deems fit. This Article argues that fundamental principles of substantive due process limit zero tolerance. In particular, substantive due process prohibits state actors from (1) treating substantially dissimilarly situated students as though they are the same; (2) disregarding a student’s good-faith mistakes or innocence; and (3) presupposing the answers to due process inquiries so as to render hearings meaningless. Zero tolerance policies breach each of these principles and represent a broad overreach of state power, akin to the sort of state overreaching that the Supreme Court has struck down in related areas of juvenile justice. To comply with due process, the state must consider students’ intent and culpability, along with the potential harm posed by the behavior at issue. Contrary to conventional wisdom, courts can strike down zero tolerance policies that fail to take these steps without re-crafting constitutional doctrine.
An Experiment in the Optimal Precision of Contract Default Rules

This Article conducts an empirical experiment to shed light on a simply stated, but vexing, question in contract law: What is the optimal precision of legal default rules? Should lawmakers pick just one simple default rule for an entire legal system, or should they design more complex default rules to offer customized legal treatment for different markets - or even for different parties? The Article uses empirical data and analytical modeling to explore this problem of default rule precision. I do not presume to offer a comprehensive theory, but the experiment should help to define the contours of the problem a bit more clearly. Empirical work is perfectly suited for gnawing at the corners of a tough problem, and hopefully this Article will make a little headway on the trade-offs between simple and complex default rules in contract law. The main claim of the Article is that simple default rules often do seem better than complex ones - at least for the markets and rules used in this experiment. I am unable to draw more definitive conclusions because the work relies, at least in part, on assumptions for some of the variables. Overall, however, there are reasons to believe that contract law should usually prefer simple default rules and leave more detailed adjustments of these rules to the contracting parties. This abstract is taken from an article titled An Experiment in the Optimal Precision of Contract Default Rules, by George S. Geis, published in 80 TUL. L. REV. 1109 (2006). Reprinted with the permission of the Tulane Law Review Association, which holds the copyright.
Epistemic Institutions and Epistemic Cooperation in International Environmental Governance

Under what conditions should epistemic institutions (institutions that provide policy-relevant scientific advice) be integrated into international legal institutions – for example, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change? Following work in law and economics on the theory of the firm, this article argues that where states will not implement environmental policies absent a collective decision to do so, greater hierarchical control of epistemic institutions by legal institutions may be necessary to ensure the credibility and availability of a usable scientific record. Hierarchy creates credibility because it allows all states necessary for cooperation in the legal institution to oversee the production of the scientific record that provides the basis for international legal rules. Hierarchy thus enhances the effectiveness of international law as a coordination tool, even at the expense of the autonomy of the scientific process. By contrast, where collective action is not necessary because states will unilaterally regulate an environmental problem once scientific uncertainty has been reduced, epistemic and legal institutions should be fragmented to ensure the unbiased production and dissemination of scientific information. In such situations, the credibility of the scientific record is demonstrated by decentralized adoption of science-based regulation.
Access to U.S. Federal Courts as a Forum for Human Rights Disputes: Pluralism and the Alien Tort Claims Act

Courts hearing cases under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) are asked to consider and evaluate the content of Customary International Law (CIL). These acts of incorporating non-U.S. sources of law can be framed as acts of legal pluralism. This article describes the contributions the ATCA has made toward increasing both civic and legal pluralism and argues that the robust history and tradition of instances of legal pluralism allow the introduction of CIL into the decision making process of U.S. courts without undue difficulty. It also posits that such inclusion has the desirable effect of increasing routes toward civic participation available to victims of human rights abuses.
Applying behavioral economics in predictive analytics for B2B churn: Findings from service quality data

Abstract Motivated by the long-standing debate on rationality in behavioral economics and the potential of theory-driven predictive analytics, this paper examines the link between service quality and B2B churn. Using longitudinal B2B transactional data with service quality indicators provided by a large company, we present evidence that both rationality and bounded-rationality assumptions play significant roles in predicting organizational decisions on churn. Specifically, variables that relate to the assumed rationality of organizations appear to provide accurate predictions while, at the same time, variables that capture boundedly rational decision rules appear to play a role through “somatic states” that make organizations more sensitive to the rational variables. In addition to presenting a novel approach for predicting organizational decisions on churn, this paper offers theoretical and managerial insights as well as opportunities for future research at the intersection of behavioral economics and predictive analytics for decision-making.
Does Analyst Stock Ownership Affect Reporting Behavior

An analyst who owns stock in the company she covers may be tempted to protect or enhance her personal interests. This paper examines how this potential conflict of interest affects the reporting of sell-side analysts by identifying and collecting two samples, the first from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 144 filings, and the second from voluntary ownership disclosures. Ordered probit analyses show that owning analyst recommendations are slightly more cautious than those of the control analysts. There is little robust evidence that stock ownership leads to optimistic analyst reporting, however findings indicate that analysts who are consistently optimistic are owners. The results are consistent with a conclusion that analyst stock ownership, unlike other potential incentives, may not be a significant concern since in many cases multiple nonowning analysts also provide reports. Being an outlier potentially reduces any benefit to the owning analyst and risks her personal reputation. In the absence of a detrimental effect, ownership offers a potential benefit as a credible signal of an analyst's conviction in a company's prospects.
The One-Size-Fits-All Family

Family policy and the law based on it assume universals. That is, if marriage improves the welfare of the majority of couples and their children, it is worth pushing as a policy initiative. Further, laws will be written (or kept on the books) that privilege marriage over other family forms. Similarly, research that tells us that divorce harms children except following the relatively small number of highly conflicted marriages, spawns efforts to preserve troubled marriages or even to roll back liberal or relatively inexpensive divorce laws. With yet another example, since adopted children mostly do better than children left either in foster homes or in informal substitute caregiving situations, policymakers react by enacting legislation like the Adoption and Safe Families Act and streamlining (within constitutional limits) the procedures for terminating parental rights. One reaction to this phenomenon is to enact default rules that cover the majority of cases, hoping that people who want to do something else will contract their way around the rules. First, policy makers need to choose the right default rules (and arguably do not do so). Still, perhaps this approach is a saner one than the chaos of tailoring family law to fit all our sizes and shapes. But the three examples in the preceding paragraph (marriage, divorce, and child welfare policy) all point to instances that are not good candidates for contracting. The current inquiry reexamines some of what we might call universalist assumptions, concluding that despite good intentions and concern for equal rights, even these big and important policies do not always work the same way for all groups, at least in terms of their effects on children. As long as the laws' effects are not pernicious - that is, they do not adversely affect groups of children in their wake, perhaps there is nothing wrong with promoting these policies. But when they make things better for some children and worse for others, we do think someone should take another look. Sometimes the situation calls for exceptions to statutes, or sometimes further careful empirical studies. We offer evidence to suggest that similar circumstances involving adults' legal relationships have very different consequences for children of different races and genders. We have also shown that foster care (and 'kinship care') have different implications depending on children's race. In these and other situations, social science suggests that law applied equally will have different consequences.
COGNITIVE STYLE DIFFERENCES OF NOVICE SERIAL AND PORTFOLIO ENTREPRENEURS: A TWO-SAMPLE TEST

Based on research and conceptualizations of cognition, we propose a model that provides a process explanation for habitual entrepreneurship. The model includes three paths that illustrate how distinct push and pull factors may influence an owner-manager to engage in habitual entrepreneurship. We propose that a more intuitive (less rational) cognitive style operates as a direct pull factor and influences other pull and push factors through the greater tendencies to (1) be attracted to entrepreneurial contexts, (2) recognize new opportunities, and (3) experience negative psychosocial outcomes in formal organizations. Empirical tests provide support for our basic premise that an intuitive cognitive style is associated with entrepreneurial behavior in general and habitual entrepreneurship.
A Public Interest Model for Applying Lost Chance Theory to Probabilistic Injuries in Employment Discrimination Cases

Introduction 2 I. The Rudiments Of Lost Chance Theory 10 A. The Theoretical Underpinnings: Separating Causation from Valuation 10 B. The Cancer Misdiagnosis Hypothetical 13 C. Criticisms Surrounding the Lost Chance Approach 17 D. The Herskovits Case: A Medical Malpractice Application of the Lost Chance Theory 21 II. The Introduction Of "Pure" Lost Chance Theory Into Employment Discrimination Litigation 25 A. Doll v. Brown: A “Theoretical Discussion” on Pure Lost Chance Theory in the Employment Discrimination Context 26 B. Bishop v. Gainer: Cutting an Employment Discrimination Remedial "Gordian Knot" 32 C. Biondo v. City of Chicago: Applying Lost Chance Theory to Speculative Future Promotions 34 III. Considerations Advising Against Adopting Pure Lost Chance Theory In Employment Discrimination Cases 39 A. Statutory Concerns Regarding Pure Lost Chance Theory 40 B. Prudential Concerns Regarding Pure Lost Chance Theory 45 IV. A Public Interest Model For Applying Lost Chance Theory To Probabilistic Injuries In Employment Discrimination Cases 48 A. Setting Up the Employment Discrimination Litigation Context for Lost Chance Theory 48 B. The Fundamentals of the Public Interest Model 51
Toward a better measure of business proximity: topic modeling for industry intelligence

In this article, we propose a new data-analytic approach to measure firms' dyadic business proximity. Specifically, our method analyzes the unstructured texts that describe firms' businesses using the statistical learning technique of topic modeling, and constructs a novel business proximity measure based on the output. When compared with existent methods, our approach is scalable for large datasets and provides finer granularity on quantifying firms' positions in the spaces of product, market, and technology. We then validate our business proximity measure in the context of industry intelligence and show the measure's effectiveness in an empirical application of analyzing mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. high technology industry. Based on the research, we also build a cloud-based information system to facilitate competitive intelligence on the high technology industry.
The Controversy over Hospital Charges to the Uninsured - No Villains, No Heroes

Beginning in March 2003, the Wall Street Journal ran a series of articles focusing on hospitals that charge uninsured patients inflated hospital rates and aggressively hound them to make collections. The articles emphasized the collections methods used by some hospitals, including even "body attachments," where the patient debtors were jailed until they could pay bail. During the summer of 2004, uninsured patients commenced a wave of class action lawsuits, alleging that hospitals charged them higher rates than the hospitals accepted from insurance plans for comparable services. The lawsuits also alleged that the hospitals failed to advise the uninsured of available options for charity care, and aggressively pursued the patients to make collection on the exorbitant bills. Thus began an examination of this anomaly: the only segment of society that pays undiscounted charges for hospital care is the uninsured. This Article will examine how this situation came about and what has been done to address the issue. Most hospitals have adopted indigent billing and collections practices so that the uninsured will not be charged the highest rates the hospitals bill to all payors. However, the Article points out that the same system of excessive charges for the uninsured can occur with regard to other types of healthcare providers as well. Relief from charges should be broadened to include the full range of providers who charge the uninsured at the uppermost limit of the providers' rates. The problems that the uninsured face have not changed much. Hospital bills, even at prevailing managed care rates, will probably continue to be beyond the means of the working poor or the unemployed to pay. This population will continue to be subject to collections with only the most aggressive collections tactics being abandoned.