cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Common law judicial decision making: The case of the New York court of appeals 1900-1941

The vast majority of the political science literature on judicial decision making focuses on the behavior of US Supreme Court justices in deciding questions of constitutional law, administrative law, or statutory interpretation. There is a paucity of comparable quantitative studies of the behavior of common law judges over time. This paper is an attempt to learn what quantitative techniques that have been developed to understand the behavior of US Supreme Court justices might tell us about the behavior of common law judges. Using newly collected data derived from all opinions issued by the New York Court of Appeals — generally considered the preeminent common law court in the U.S. during the period in question — from 1900 to 1941, we examine the degree of behavioral consistency across time and issue areas within (and between) judges. We find that voting on the New York Court of Appeals often was highly patterned during this time period. Examining the cases and opinions from this period provides some insight on the underlying disagreements in views and values that produce patterned voting. Interestingly, the nature of the disagreements in cases with highly patterned voting changes significantly over time. In the early 1900s the court is divided between judges who might be described alternatively as moralistic or legalistic and judges who take a more pragmatic and prudential approach. In the 1918 Term and through the mid-1920s disagreements about whether and the degree to which liability for accidental harm is fault-based and about the appropriate tradeoff between stability and flexibility in the law divide the Court. After two steadfast conservatives leave the Court in 1926 voting becomes less patterned and it is difficult to discern the underlying disagreements that might explain the patterns the model finds. This does not persist. At the end of the 1930s we find fairly highly polarized voting on recognizable ideological lines in labor and constitutional cases and in personal injury cases. Interestingly, the “right” wing of the court in labor and constitutional cases is the pro-plaintiff wing in personal injury cases.
Social Enterprise As Commitment: A Roadmap

For-profit social enterprises lack the external accountability mechanisms of the charitable and corporate sectors. Absent legal reform, a for-profit social enterprise must develop internal mechanisms to prioritize its social mission, mitigate tensions between pursuing dual missions, and avoid engaging in deceptive greenwashing. This article contributes to the field of law and entrepreneurship by presenting a commitment approach to social enterprise governance within the bounds of existing social enterprise laws. Commitment to the amelioration of a social or environmental problem is a central attribute of social enterprise. A commitment approach is one in which for-profit social enterprise founders and the board of directors, in the early stages of the firm, adopt governance policies and processes that create an organizational identity committed to mission-accountability, transparency, and stakeholder governance. Adoption of a commitment approach at the highest levels of the organization aids in creating an organizational identity that reigns in conflict between social mission and financial profitability when managers face difficult decisions over costs and resource allocation. This article presents the commitment approach through the lens of a fictional for-profit social enterprise, and recommends specific governance policies and processes for public benefit corporations, benefit corporations, and social purpose corporations.
No Power to be Disloyal (or, How Not to Write a Loyalty Opinion)

Sometimes, courts find that a manager or director of a business entity was disloyal. The fiduciary duty of loyalty is a lofty standard. Under such a standard, exonerating a defendant may be difficult, even when it is the right thing to do. But a defendant who is not pure as the driven snow may sometimes not deserve liability. A judge with high standards may decline to approve of the defendant’s conduct but still want to reach the right result. When courts decline to find disloyalty, they give various reasons: the disloyalty was waived, the conduct was ratified by an appropriate constituency, or the conduct was fair. But sometimes courts talk as if certain conduct is privileged, as if some right owned by the defendant trumped the duty of loyalty. Generally, it is a right given in the applicable code without a hint that it relates in any way to the duty of loyalty. I find this talk troubling. The duty of loyalty is the bedrock of investor expectations. The duty requires that defendants act in good faith, i.e., that their actions serve a purpose of the entity and are not intentionally or in conscious disregard of the rights of investors. Methods of unfair opportunism available to insiders are endless. Only an open-ended duty could catch them all.So talk of privilege or right to act notwithstanding loyalty is a concern. Nearly any absolute privilege to act, given the right circumstances, can be used disloyally. Courts’ stating that a business entity actor has a privilege to do any act notwithstanding the interests of investors is an invitation to those actors to use that privilege to cheat. It is the thesis of this paper that no privilege to act disloyally exists: that a power to act never trumps the duty of loyalty. My method is to discuss three cases in which the privilege or power to act appears to receive judicial support: Covalt v. High (N.M. App. 1983); North-West Transportation Co., Ltd. v. Beatty (UK Privy Council 1887); and Thorpe v. CERBCO, Inc. (Del. 1996). The paper shows why this strategy does not work. Such assertions have no support in logic (and usually not in law), provide a slippery slope at the bottom of which the duty of loyalty ceases to exist, often result in a decision being internally inconsistent, and fail to stand the test of time. I will do my best to unwind the harm these cases might cause. My hope is that those reading this paper will take its criticism to future cases so that this kind of argument can be defeated elsewhere in the law, and so that courts will not assert such things in the future. There is always a better, wiser course.
Shops and the City: Evidence on Local Externalities and Local Government Policy from Big-Box Bankruptcies

We report three findings: (1) Using evidence from chain bankruptcies and data on 12-18 million establishments per year, we show that large retailers produce significant positive spillovers. (2) Local governments respond to the size of these externalities. When a town’s boundaries allow it to capture a larger share of retail spillovers, it is more likely to offer retail subsidies. (3) These subsidies partially crowd out private-sector mechanisms that also subsidize large retailers, such as shopping malls. These facts provide powerful evidence of the Coase theorem at work and highlight a concern for local development policies even when externalities can be targeted.
Discussion of The Value of Financial Statement Verification in Debt Financing: Evidence from Private U.S. Firms

I discuss Minnis [2010] in the context of the broader literature on private firm financing. In particular, I focus on the unique features of the private firm setting and how it affects research design and inference. I detail the alternative information sources available to debt financiers of private firms that may limit the role of auditors and firm financial statements. I review research in the private firm setting that documents the heightened importance of many omitted correlated variables such as the loan characteristics, contractual terms, and the characteristics of the entrepreneur that affect cost of debt. In evaluating the validity of Minnis’s [2010] hypotheses and econometric methods, I report findings from a representative sample of private firms provided by the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Small Business Finances.
Money and asset prices in a continuous-time Lucas and Stokey cash-in-advance economy

Abstract This paper develops a continuous-time version of the Lucas and Stokey [1987. Money and interest in a cash-in-advance economy. Econometrica 55, 491–513] cash-in-advance economy. The continuous-time setting allows for an exact characterization of equilibrium expected excess returns, real and nominal interest rates, the price level, and the inflation risk premium, for general preferences and stochastic processes. Explicit general-equilibrium solutions are obtained for separable logarithmic preferences and serially correlated processes for output and money growth. A characteristic feature of the economy is that even when preferences are separable in cash and credit goods, money supply still affects asset prices.
Taxation and evasion in the presence of extortion by organized crime

We model the taxation behavior of a revenue-maximizing government in the presence of a competing tax collector, i.e., the mafia, and tax evasion. Firms choosing to evade taxes must shift some of their sales underground, possibly incurring costs. In the mafia's presence, the government's optimal tax rate and payoff depend on the importance to firms of the public goods provided by the government and those provided by the mafia. When public goods are important, both the state's tax rate and revenues are lower in the presence of the mafia than without it. However, when public goods are unimportant, the government benefits from the mafia's taxation of the firms' underground activities. Journal of Comparative Economics 32 (3) (2004) 375–387.
The Failed Invigoration of Argentina's Constitution: Presidential Omnipotence, Repression, Instability, and Lawlessness in Argentine History

Argentina's constitution dates back to 1853 and has rarely been formally suspended. Nevertheless, constitutionalism has almost never existed in Argentina, as virtually each government's power exceeded the strictures of the constitution. Presidential omnipotence, state violence, political instability, the absence of the rule of law, and political clientelism have been recurrent problems throughout Argentine history. Peronism, a quintessential Argentine movement, has likewise hindered constitutionalism. The article explores historical, legal, political, and sociological factors behind the failed invigoration of Argentina's constitution.
Goodyear and Nicastro: Observations from a Transnational and Comparative Perspective

This article views the recent U.S. Supreme Court jurisdictional cases, Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S.A. v. Brown and J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd v. Nicastro, from both a transnational and comparative perspective. As transnational cases, Goodyear and Nicastro raise the question whether the Due Process Clause of the Constitution should be interpreted to impose different standards for domestic and foreign defendants. Professor Silberman argues that a national contacts approach is appropriate for specific jurisdiction but not general jurisdiction. She also examines various proposals for reaching foreign defendants who market in the United States but do not have sufficient connections with a single state. Professor Silberman examines how courts in Canada have dealt with transnational cases, noting a very recent decision of the Canadian Supreme Court, Club Resorts v. Charron, released just as the article was going to print and may have changed the Canadian approach to jurisdiction. Professor Silberman also offers a comparative look at the jurisdictional regime in the European Union, along with the recent European Recast proposal, as a means to evaluate the U.S. approach to both general and specific jurisdiction in transnational cases.
Anomalies enhanced: A portfolio rebalancing approach

Many anomalies are based on low frequency attributes, such as annual characteristics, that ignore higher frequency information. In this paper, we provide a simple strategy to incorporate the higher frequency information. We find that there is significant economic value-added. For eight major anomalies, we find that the enhanced anomalies can double the average returns while having similar or lower risks. The results are robust to a number of controls.
Documentarians, fair use, and free expression: changes in copyright attitudes and actions with access to best practices

This study, based on a survey of 489 documentary filmmakers, is a case study in copyright policy in and through practice. It assesses the changes in documentary production practice around clearance of copyrighted material since the creation of the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in fair use in 2005. Fair use, an exotic and occasional feature of documentary film in 2004, has become well known and commonly employed. Creative options for filmmakers concerning the use of third-party material have dramatically improved with changes in norms after the issuing of the Statement. Attitudes about fair use are strongly associated with free expression and creative opportunity, and vary with experience. Where filmmakers have changed work because of copyright concerns, they themselves rather than any gatekeeper have made the decision to do so. Where change is associated with fair use, risk is a common concern. Newer filmmakers are more likely to support the use of copyrighted material to make new wo...
1-share orders and trades

Abstract 1-share trades are the most common odd lot trade size, accounting for 9.62% of all odd lot transactions and 3.65% of all trades on NASDAQ in 2012. While 50.41% of 1-share trades result from broken orders, 34.89% of 1-share trades are intentional. We provide substantial evidence that traders use 1-share trades to “ping” for hidden liquidity. In particular, our results indicate that 1-share trades are disproportionately aggressive and also execute against hidden liquidity more than any other odd lot trade size. We also find a relative increase in trading immediately following a 1-share trade. Our results are in line with Clark-Joseph (2014), who suggests that traders may use small, unprofitable trades to detect information from other traders. Specifically, 1-share trades represent the minimum cash outlay necessary to trade, while simultaneously producing the smallest possible effects on a market maker's inventory, and in turn, a security's price.
On the role of traditional ecological knowledge as a collaborative concept: a philosophical study

The concept of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), along with synonymous or closely related terms like indigenous knowledge and native science, has some of its origins in literatures on international development and adaptive management. There is a tendency to want to determine one definition for TEK that can satisfy every stakeholder in every situation. Yet a scan of environmental science and policy literatures reveals there to be differences in definitions that make it difficult to form a consensus. What should be explored instead is the role that the concept of TEK plays in facilitating or discouraging cross-cultural and cross-situational collaboration among actors working for indigenous and non-indigenous institutions of environmental governance, such as tribal natural resources departments, federal agencies working with tribes, and co-management boards. This is a philosophical paper that explores how the concept of TEK is defined in science and policy literatures and what purpose it serves for improving cooperative environmental and natural resources stewardship and management between indigenous and non-indigenous institutions. The philosophical method applied here is one that outlines numerous possible meanings of a concept (TEK, in this paper) and the implications of each meaning for science and policy. In science and policy literatures, there are different definitions of TEK. Controversy can brew over TEK when people hold definitions that are based on different assumptions. There are two kinds of assumptions about the meaning of TEK. The first kind refers to assumptions about the mobilization of TEK, or what I call knowledge mobilization. The second kind involves assumptions about how to understand the relationship between TEK and disciplines like ecology or biology, or, in other words, the relation between TEK and science. Different positions that fall under the two kinds of assumptions (knowledge mobilization; TEK and science) can generate disagreements because they imply differences about “whose” definition of TEK gets privileged, who is counted as having expert authority over environmental governance issues, and how TEK should be factored into policy processes that already have a role for disciplines like forestry or toxicology in them. In light such disagreements, I argue that the concept of TEK should be understood as a collaborative concept. It serves to invite diverse populations to continually learn from one another about how each approaches the very question of “knowledge” in the first place, and how these different approaches can be blended to better steward natural resources and adapt to climate change. The implication is that environmental scientists and policy professionals, indigenous and non-indigenous, should not be in the business of creating definitions of TEK. Instead, they should focus more on creating long term processes that allow the different implications of approaches to knowledge in relation to stewardship goals to be responsibly thought through.
The Business Lawyer as Terrorist Transaction Cost Engineer

It is well known that, to deter strategic behavior, parties to contracts can create contractual "hostages", e.g., grant a lender a security interest. Yet many transactions provide no natural hostage. This Article argues that lawyers take "hostages" by drafting provisions that provide latent, unreasonable contractual rights exercisable in remote contingencies, which facilitate cooperative contract performance. By formulating arrangements that decrease the potential for opportunism, these lawyers are acting, in Gilson's phrase, as "transaction cost engineers." Because the hostages are seized without the express consent of the parties providing the hostages, one might characterize lawyers who act this way as "terrorists"--the term typically applied to those who unilaterally seize hostages. This perspective first provides a rationale for conduct that can cause lawyers acting reasonably in contract negotiations to acquire reputations for being unreasonable and second challenges the underpinnings of some customary rules of contract construction.
Cardiac Pacemakers v. St. Jude Medical: The Federal Circuit Has Re-Opened the Deepsouth Loophole for Method Claims

In Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc. v. St. Jude Medical, Inc., the Federal Circuit ruled en banc that 35 U.S.C. § 271(f) categorically does not apply to method claims. The court rejected the contention that the "components" of a patented method can refer to the physical structures used in carrying out the method and instead defined the components of a method claim as "the steps that comprise the method." Because infringement under § 271(f) requires that the invention components be "supplied" from the United States in order for infringement to occur, the Federal Circuit concluded that this section cannot apply to method claims because "[s]upplying an intangible step is... a physical impossibility.” Although Cardiac Pacemakers comports with the presumption against extraterritorial application of U.S. law and eliminates uncertainty in regard to the infringement of patented processes abroad, it is flawed because it re-opens a loophole previously closed by Congress. Part I of this Note provides a brief historical background on the enactment of § 271(f) as well as a summary of the myriad judicial interpretations of this statutory text. Part II documents the relevant portions of the case history of Cardiac Pacemakers, details the Federal Circuit’s en banc holding, and explores Judge Newman’s dissent. Finally, Part III analyzes § 271(f) using three different theories of statutory interpretation, discusses conflicting policy implications, and offers an improved and clarified version of the statute. This Note concludes that the Federal Circuit has misinterpreted the statutory language of § 271(f), and has therefore erred in categorically excluding method claims from being covered by this provision.
Sociology and Entrepreneurship: Concepts and Contributions:

Sociological perspectives and research provide important and distinctive contributions to the understanding of entrepreneurship in three ways. The first is through the development of societal conce...
Civil Rights in Crisis: The Racial Impact of the Denial of the Sixth Amendment Right to Counsel

Whereas in 2013 there had been widespread celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, much has been written in subsequent years about the unhappy state of the quality of counsel provided to indigents. But it is not just defense counsel who fail to comply with all that we hope and expect would be done by those who are part of our criminal courts; prosecutorial misconduct, if not actually increasing, is becoming more visible. The judiciary chooses to focus on the rapid processing of cases, often ignoring the rights of those being prosecuted – rights the judges have sworn to protect. But we must ask why has this country tolerated a criminal justice system which has been so dysfunctional? Why are many of the criminal courts in our urban centers an embarrassment to any of us who would want to see the individualized care and concern that our nation prides itself in maintaining and championing? Why is funding for our criminal courts – the public defenders, prosecutors, and the judiciary – so inadequate?This Article offers an explanation: America tolerates unjust and often unconstitutional treatment of those accused of crime because so many of those accused are minorities.
Participation games: Market entry, coordination, and the beautiful blonde

Abstract We find the Nash equilibria for monotone n -player symmetric games where each player chooses whether to participate. Examples include market entry games, coordination games, and the bar-room game depicted in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”. The symmetric Nash equilibrium involves excessive participation (a common property resource problem) if participants’ payoffs are decreasing (in the number of participants), and insufficient participation if payoffs are increasing. With decreasing payoffs there can be many equilibria, but with increasing payoffs there are only 3. Some comparative static properties of changing one player's participation payoffs are counterintuitive, especially with more than two players.
Rethinking property rights: comparative analysis of conservation easements for wildlife conservation

SUMMARY Conservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation easement approach to wildlife conservation in contrasting rural and periurban regions? and (2) How does analysis of conservation easements differ when examining property as a bundle of rights or alternative metaphors? These questions were addressed through document analysis, interviews and GIS mapping in two regions where The Nature Conservancy deployed conservation easements for wildlife habitat: rural Lassen Foothills and periurban Tenaja Corridor, USA. Splitting the bundle allowed for site and region-specific easements with differences in permitted housing densities, land management and hunting. Easements focused on restricted rights rather than affirmative duties. The challenges of habitat connectivity in the fragmented Tenaja Corridor revealed the limits of parcel-based acquisition. Analysts and conservation practitioners should rethink the bundle of rights concept of property, considering a bundle of duties, powers and owners within a broader web of social and ecological interests, to understand the role of conservation acquisitions in contrasting landscape contexts.
The science of governance: A blind spot of risk managers and corporate governance reform?

This paper identifies the science of governance as a crucial blind spot for risk managers, company directors, regulators and law makers. There is little evidence that law-makers, corporate governance reformers or risk managers apply the science of governance identified 60 years ago. As a result, there are no accepted criteria for identifying or measuring good or higher standards of corporate governance or identifying its relevance for managing risk. This paper identifies why the current top- down approach to governance and risk management is incompatible with the bottom- up approach found in biota to manage risk so as to sustain life in highly complex uncertain environments. A bottom-up approach allows investors and stakeholders to become co-regulators of the risks to which they are exposed. As the mission of regulators is to protect citizens, citizen involvement as co-regulators richly increases the ability of risk managers, directors, firms and their regulators to minimise the risk exposure of firms, their stakeholders and/or the financial system. The paper identifies the need for risk managers, company directors, regulators and law makers to acquire knowledge of how to apply the science of governance to manage risk in the most efficient and effective sustainable basis.
Fig Leaf Federalism and Tenth Amendment Exceptionalism

The Supreme Court's jurisprudence of federalism is at best undergoing an unfinished transformation, and is at worst just troubled and unsatisfying. In a little-noticed dissent in Tennessee v. Lane, Justice Scalia proposed an approach that could be generalized well beyond the specific position that he took in that case. Thus generalized, this approach may be understood as an elaboration of a proposal made by Justice O'Connor in her dissenting opinion twenty years ago in Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Auth. If adopted by the Court, this synthesis of the O'Connor and Scalia suggestions could work a real transformation in its federalism jurisprudence, and without some of the potentially radical side-effects that have thus far made the Court timorous and inconsistent. This very short paper explains how the synthesis would work, and why the Court should adopt it.
Long-Run Exchange Rate Modeling; A Survey of the Recent Evidence

In this paper we survey the recent literature on long run, or equilibrium, exchange rate modeling. In particular, we review the voluminous literature which tests for a unit root in real exchange rates and the closely related work on testing for a unit root in the residual from a regression of the nominal exchange rate on relative prices. We argue that the balance of evidence is supportive of the existence of some form of long-run exchange rate relationship. The form of this relationship, however, does not accord exactly with a traditional representation of the long-run exchange rate. We offer some potential explanations for this lack of conformity.
Wage Discrimination When Identity Is Subjective: Evidence from Changes in Employer-Reported Race

In Brazil, different employers report different racial classifications for the same worker. We use the variation in race across employers to estimate the relationship between race and wages. Workers whose reported race changes from nonwhite to white receive a wage increase; those who change from white to nonwhite realize a symmetric wage decrease. As much as 40 percent of the racial wage gap remains after controlling for all individual characteristics that do not change across jobs. We formally test, and reject, the hypothesis that our results are driven by misclassification. We also evaluate several mechanisms that could explain our findings.
A Model of Russia's "Virtual Economy"

The Russian Economy has evolved into a hybrid form, a partially monetized quasi-market system that has been called the virtual economy. In the virtual economy, barter and non-monetary transactions play a key role in transferring value from productive activities to the loss-making sectors of the economy. We show how this transfer takes place, and how it can be consistent with the incentives of economic agents. We analyze a simple partial-equilibrium model of the virtual economy, and show how it might prove an obstacle to industrial restructuring and hence marketizing transition.
Ringing in the 20th Century : The Effects of State Monopolies, Private Ownership, and Operating Licenses on Telecommunications in Europe, 1892-1914

Countries around the world are liberalizing their telecommunications networks by privatizing incumbent state-owned firms and introducing competition. For many, this change represents a return to private provision and competition-not a new phenomenon. The beginning of the 20th century saw great variation in the structure of telecommunications sectors, with some countries operating state monopolies and others-especially in Scandinavia-allowing vigorous private competition. The author uses data on countries around the world in 1913 and on European countries in 1892-1914 to test the effects of government monopolies, private provision, and operating licenses on telephone development. Controlling for per capita income and, where possible, for country and year fixed effects, he finds that state monopoly provision is correlated with substantially lower telephone penetration and higher consumer prices for long-distance service than private provision. Contrary to conventional wisdom, rural service was also worse under state-owned monopolies. Operating licenses that gave the state the right to appropriate firms' assets similarly led to lower telephone penetration and higher prices.
Ethical Standards for Stockbrokers: Fiduciary or Suitability?

What are the ethical obligations of the sellers of financial products to their customers? Stockbrokers in the U.S. have a legal and ethical requirement to recommend only “suitable” investments to their customers. This is a fairly weak standard. Currently, there are proposals to raise the standard to a fiduciary one in which the recommendations would have to be in the best interests of the clients. Brokers sell solutions to financial problems. Similar to an auto mechanic or a doctor, the product often consists of both the professional advice and its implementation. There are numerous conflicts of interest between brokerage firms and their customers in that the products that pay the highest commissions may not be the best ones for the customers. The societal perspective adds complications, however. Society depends on modern financial markets to raise capital for productive enterprises and to spread risk. Issuers of financial products need distribution channels for their products just like the producers of any other products. Commissions create powerful incentives for the distribution channels, but at the same time produce conflicts of interest—a type of ethical pollution. Just as our society tolerates some pollution as a byproduct of other useful activities, it may be useful to tolerate some of these financial conflicts of interest. The nature of the relationship should govern the ethical standard. Those selling advice, regardless of how they label themselves, should adhere to a best-interest fiduciary standard. More limited relationships should be limited to the mandate involved in the relationship.
A model of income transfers for the urban poor

Abstract In developing nations cash transfers between households play a role in maintaining poor urban families at income levels sufficient to meet expenditures on basic needs. In our analysis, a social network is seen as redistributing income to those member households who fall below a perceived basic needs threshold. This redistributive mechanism can be though of as the outcome of an implicit social contract whereby households insure themselves against the risk of falling below a perceived basic needs level. Using data from El Salvador, regression estimates which account for transfers received by poor households are found to be consistent with the proposed model.
Board diversity, firm risk, and corporate policies

Abstract We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multidimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in research and development (R&D) and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.
FrameEx: Classroom Exercise to Demonstrate Analytic Framework Value

Managers apply analytical frameworks such as SWOT, PESTEL, VRIO, Porter’s Five Forces, CAGE distance, etc., to gain insight toward strategic decisions affecting their firm (Linnehan & De Carolis, 2005). Undergraduate business students are often introduced to these frameworks during their senior year capstone course — prior to gaining relevant work experience (Kopelman & Davis, 2004). The lack of prior experiential anchors can create a learning barrier for some students (Duhon, Bushardt, & Daniel, 2006). Our interactive classroom exercise can provide a fun alternative tool for instructors in dealing with this student limitation (Pengtao, Santhanam, & Carswell, 2009). The exercise is easy to conduct and students tend to enjoy the experience. We refer to our classroom tool as FrameEx (short for Framework Exercise).
Management Quality and State Bond Ratings: Exploring the Links between Public Management and Fiscal Outcomes

How and when does management matter for government performance? Focusing on the quality of core management systems, this study proposes that one way management contributes to government effectiveness is by facilitating access to low-cost credit. However, whether well-managed systems have greater access to low-cost debt compared to poorly managed organizations depends in part on prevailing conditions in the external environment. The study tests these propositions in the context of state governments' general obligation bond ratings. Results from the pooled Tobit models show that states with higher-quality management systems are rewarded with higher bond ratings. However, the positive effects of management on bond ratings are attenuated when the economy deteriorates or political uncertainties increase.
CONTEMPLATING THE ENDGAME: AN EVOLUTIONARY MODEL FOR THE HARMONIZATION AND CENTRALIZATION OF INTERNATIONAL SECURITIES REGULATION

In the realm of international securities law, many regulators and commentators are satisfied with simply living in the “now” without thinking about what an ideal system of international securities law should look like and the path to how such a system of law could be achieved. Of course some regulators and commentators are satisfied with the current system of international securities law that has evolved in the past few decades. However, many believe that this model of regulatory competition is simply an unfortunate byproduct of the nationalistic and protectionist attitudes of many nations and a reality that cannot be overcome. Ideally, the world should adopt an approach to international securities regulation that is similar to the approach used by the United States in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Such a system of international securities regulation would prevent a race-to-the-bottom in international securities law and avoid other collective action problems by creating a floor for regulation and a centralized actor to enforce this baseline system of securities law. The problem, of course, is that this is a drastic and unrealistic proposal in the short-term because of the nationalistic and protectionist tendencies of many securities regulators. Although the emerging global capital markets have begun to fuel the convergence of many business norms, the world does not seem ready for a centralized global securities regulator with robust monitoring, regulatory, and enforcement powers.In this article, I argue that the harmonization and centralization of international securities law should and must occur through a slow evolutionary process, rather than a rapid revolutionary process, because only under these circumstances will a centralized global securities regulator be able to emerge. Ultimately, anything that fuels the process toward harmonization and centralization of international securities law is a positive, and no single path to such a system of securities law is required. With that stated, however, the world has begun to develop a seamless global capital market. The end of international securities regulation must be to develop a seamless global system of securities law to regulate that market.
Kingsfield and Kennedy: Reappraising the Male Models of Law School Teaching

Many of us have struggled with the difficult and complex question of how best to teach our students. On one level, we ask: What are the best ways to convey information and skills to our students? How can we do it effectively in classes of fifty, eighty, one hundred, or more? On another level, we ask: What do our students need to know in order to become good lawyers? On yet a deeper level, the issue is political. Do we as women teachers make law school productive and rewarding for our women students? Do we promote nonsexist values that make it harder for the lawyers we train to dismiss the achievements of their female colleagues? Do we lead students to thoughtful questions about the larger society or are we simply one cog in a wheel that transforms a group of idealistic young people into fodder for large firms?
Reviewing the Sentencing Guidelines: Judicial Politics, Empirical Evidence, and Reform

Amid widespread belief that unwarranted sentencing disparity existed in federal criminal sentencing, Congress passed the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984,1 which established the Sentencing Commission and authorized the creation of the United States Sentencing Guidelines.2 The idea of creating guidelines to limit judicial discretion in sentencing was politically popular at the time,3 and was prompted by the belief among policymakers that significant disparities existed in sentences.4 The reaction of the federal judiciary was quite the opposite, with many federal judges objecting to the limitation of their historic sentencing discretion. Over one hundred district courts struck down the Sentencing Reform Act on a variety of constitutional grounds.5 The Supreme Court, however, upheld the Act in 1989.6 The calm lasted barely a decade. By 2000, the Court had begun to whittle away at the constitutionality of the Guidelines, beginning with the seminal case of Apprendi v New Jersey,7 and more recently with
Realism, Prediction, and Foreign Policy

Attempts by some contemporary realists to both claim that international politics are objectively predictable and at the same time prescribe particular foreign policies cannot hold together logically, because they are internally contradictory. The core argument of this article is that these attempts not only fail to fulfill their goal, but that the attempt to be scientific, to see the world as predictable, is ontologically incompatible with the core insight of classical realism, that we must see the world as it is, rather than as we want it to be. There are two ramifications of this observation for a realism that is not internally contradictory. The first is that a prescriptive realism must be a theory of foreign policy, not a theory of systems structure. And the second is that a realism that works as a theory of foreign policy prediction needs to be reflexive, needs to examine its own assumptions and biases as an integral part of the process of studying international politics.
Revisiting 'Truth in Securities Revisited': Abolishing IPOs and Harnessing Private Markets in the Public Good

This essay explores the line between private and public markets. I propose a two-tier market system to replace initial public offerings. The lower tier would be a private market restricted to accredited investors; the top tier would be a public market with unlimited access. The transition between the two markets would be based on issuer choice and market capitalization, followed by a seasoning period of disclosure and trading in the public market before the issuer would be allowed to make a public offering. I argue that such system would promote not only efficient capital formation, but also investor protection.
Penalizing the Party: Health Care Reform Issue Voting in the 2010 Election

Many political pundits characterized the 2010 election as a referendum on President Obama’s health care reform law. The political science literature on issue voting, however, does not consistently ...
The Stolen Valor Act as Constitutional: Bringing Coherence to First Amendment Analysis of False-Speech Restrictions

The Stolen Valor Act of 2005 makes it a crime for an individual to falsely represent that he has been awarded a military honor. Whether the Stolen Valor Act violates the First Amendment as an impermissible content-based restriction of speech is a legally contentious issue. The Ninth Circuit struck down the Act as unconstitutional, with Judge Bybee authoring an extensive dissent and seven judges dissenting from the denial to rehear the case en banc. And district courts are split on the Stolen Valor Act’s constitutionality. This split is largely due to the absence of any systematic approach for assessing the First Amendment status of false factual speech restrictions outside of the context of defamation law. This Comment argues that Supreme Court and lower court precedent support a four-factor test for determining whether such restrictions comply with the First Amendment, namely a test that examines whether the speech restriction 1) leads to excessive false positives; 2) risks chilling other protected speech; 3) is justified by a legitimate government interest; and 4) may be successfully corrected in the marketplace of ideas. While all factors should be considered, for the speech restriction to pass constitutional muster, it must not chill other protected speech and must be justified by a legitimate government interest. In other words, factors two and three are necessary, while factors one and four are not. This Comment shows that this test has substantial precedential support, but it also argues that the test has two additional advantages over the approaches taken by courts that have found the Stolen Valor Act constitutional: it neither constitutionally condones the criminalization of trivial lies nor paves the way for judicial invalidation of frequently litigated statutes restricting false factual statements, such as 18 USC § 1001, which makes it a crime to knowingly and willfully make false or fraudulent statement to the federal government. This Comment applies this four-factor test to the Stolen Valor Act, finding that the Stolen Valor Act does not violate the First Amendment given the high verifiability of false claims about military honors, the fact that there is no significant risk of the SVA chilling speech that matters, and the existence of a legitimate government interest in preventing the misappropriation of its property, while considering the countervailing factor of the speech restricted by the SVA being correctable.
Successor Liability and Asymmetric Information

The doctrine of successor liability transfers tort liability arising from the seller's past conduct from the seller to the buyer. If the buyer has as much information about the liability as the seller, all beneficial acquisitions take place and the seller takes the efficient level of precaution. However, if the seller has more information about the liability than the buyer, not all beneficial acquisitions are consummated and the seller takes a suboptimal level of precaution. I argue that, in the presence of information asymmetry, the courts should increase the damages against the (potential) seller to provide better incentives to take precaution while decreasing the damages against the buyer to encourage more beneficial asset sales.
Correlations in Price Changes and Volatility across International Stock Markets

The short-run interdependence of prices and price volatility across three major international stock markets is studied. Daily opening and closing prices of major stock indexes for the Tokyo, London, and New York stock markets are examined. The analysis utilizes the autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (ARCH) family of statistical models to explore these pricing relationships. Evidence of price volatility spillovers from New York to Tokyo, London to Tokyo, and New York to London is observed, but no price volatility spillover effects in other directions are found for the pre-October 1987 period. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
Coupled Mixed Model for Joint Genetic Analysis of Complex Disorders with Two Independently Collected Data Sets

In the last decade, Genome-wide Association studies (GWASs) have contributed to decoding the human genome by uncovering many genetic variations associated with various diseases. Many follow-up investigations involve joint analysis of multiple independently generated GWAS data sets. While most of the computational approaches developed for joint analysis are based on summary statistics, the joint analysis based on individual-level data with consideration of confounding factors remains to be a challenge. In this study, we propose a method, called Coupled Mixed Model (CMM), that enables a joint GWAS analysis on two independently collected sets of GWAS data with different phenotypes. The CMM method does not require the data sets to have the same phenotypes as it aims to infer the unknown phenotypes using a set of multivariate sparse mixed models. Moreover, CMM addresses the confounding variables due to population stratification, family structures, and cryptic relatedness, as well as those arising during data collection such as batch effects that frequently appear in joint genetic studies. We evaluate the performance of CMM using simulation experiments. In real data analysis, we illustrate the utility of CMM by an application to evaluating common genetic associations for Alzheimer’s disease and substance use disorder using datasets independently collected for the two complex human disorders. Comparison of the results with those from previous experiments and analyses supports the utility of our method and provides new insights into the diseases. The software is available at https://github.com/HaohanWang/CMM .
Malware Classification with Word Embedding Features.

Malware classification is an important and challenging problem in information security. Modern malware classification techniques rely on machine learning models that can be trained on features such as opcode sequences, API calls, and byte $n$-grams, among many others. In this research, we consider opcode features. We implement hybrid machine learning techniques, where we engineer feature vectors by training hidden Markov models -- a technique that we refer to as HMM2Vec -- and Word2Vec embeddings on these opcode sequences. The resulting HMM2Vec and Word2Vec embedding vectors are then used as features for classification algorithms. Specifically, we consider support vector machine (SVM), $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN), random forest (RF), and convolutional neural network (CNN) classifiers. We conduct substantial experiments over a variety of malware families. Our experiments extend well beyond any previous work in this field.