cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Water Governance in Haiti: An Assessment of Laws and Institutional Capacities

The Republic of Haiti struggles to sustainably manage its water resources. Public health is compromised by low levels of water supply, sanitation, and hygiene, and water resources are often contaminated and unsustainably allocated. While poor governance is often blamed for these shortcomings, the laws and institutions regulating water resources in Haiti are poorly understood, especially by the international community. This study brings together and analyzes Haitian water laws, assesses institutional capacities, and provides a case study of water management in northern Haiti in order to provide a more complete picture of the sector. Funded by the Inter-American Development Bank as part of the Water Availability, Quality and Integrated Water Resources Management in Northern Haiti (HA-T1179) Project, this study took place from January-July 2015, with the help of local experts and participating stakeholders. The results indicate that Haiti’s water law framework is highly fragmented, with overlapping mandates and little coordination between ministries at the national level, and ambiguous but unrealistic roles for subnational governments. A capacity assessment of institutions in northern Haiti illustrates that while local stakeholders are engaged, human and financial resources are insufficient to carry out statutory responsibilities. The findings suggest that water resources management planning should engage local governments and community fixtures while supplementing capacities with national or international support. ° This study was conducted within the framework of the Water Availability, Quality and Integrated Water Resources Management in Northern Haiti (HA-T1179) Project. It was made possible by funding from the Inter-American Development Bank. The views and conclusions drawn in this study are those of the author’s. * Ryan B. Stoa is a Senior Scholar at Florida International University’s College of Law and Institute for Water and the Environment. Research assistance was provided by Frandley Julien, Claudel Noel, Urbain Fifi, Maria Donoso, and Bartholomew Stoddard. Countless stakeholders devoted their time and energy to providing feedback on the preliminary results of this study. Without these contributions, this study would not have
The short-run underpricing of initial public offerings in the Sri Lankan stock market

Abstract This study investigates underpricing of IPOs in Sri Lanka. On average, IPOs are underpriced by 34%. Small issues are more underpriced than large issues, and privatization issues are more underpriced than conventional issues. Investor sentiment is positively related with underpricing and affects small and large issues similarly. Small privatization issues are more underpriced than large privatization issues and partially explain the asymmetry in underpricing between small and large issues. However, even after controlling for investor sentiment, privatization, hot-market conditions, underwriter-size, and industry, small issues remain more underpriced than large issues. The results strongly support the uncertainty hypothesis for larger underpricing of small issues, and privatization issues.
What's in a name? Anonymity and social distance in dictator and ultimatum games

The standard procedure in experimental economics maintains anonymity among laboratory participants, yet many field interactions are conducted with neither complete anonymity nor complete familiarity. When we are involved in interactive situations in the field, we usually have some clues concerning the characteristics of others; however, in some environments (such as e-commerce) these clues may not be very substantial. How will people respond to varying degrees of anonymity and social distance? We consider the effect of one form of social distance on behavior by comparing the standard procedure of playing dictator and ultimatum games with the same games played by participants who knew the family name of their counterparts. When these names were revealed, dictators allocated a significantly larger portion of the pie. However, this information had no significant effect on the offers in the ultimatum game, as it appears that strategic considerations crowd out impulses toward generosity or charity. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: A13; B49; C91; D63; D64
Congress Underestimated: The Case of the World Bank

International organizations undermine democracy, or so their critics charge: not only do international organizations themselves operate undemocratically, but they undercut democratic governance within their member states. In particular, when states participate in international organizations, they lose control over policy outcomes because each state must share decision-making authority with other member states. And within member states, national legislatures—the bodies specifically designed to be responsive to popular control—are marginalized. Legislatures lack direct influence over international organizations and also have little influence over the executive branch’s interactions with such organizations.
THE LIQUIDITY SERVICE OF BENCHMARK SECURITIES

We demonstrate that benchmark securities allow heterogeneously informed investors to create trading strategies that are perfectly aligned with their signals. Investors who are informed about security-specific risks but uninformed about systematic risks can take an offsetting position in benchmark securities to eliminate exposure to adverse selection in systematic risks, while investors who are informed about systematic risks but uninformed about security-specific risks can trade systematic risks exclusively using benchmark securities. We further show that introduction of benchmark securities encourages more investors to acquire both security-specific and systematic-factor information, which leads to increased liquidity and price informativeness for all individual securities. (JEL: G10, G12, G14)
Municipal Capital Spending during the “Boom”

This article analyzes municipal governments, capital spending, and revenue-raising decisions between 1993 and 2000, an era of unprecedented economic growth. It finds that, as anticipated, greater-than-expected revenues allowed many cities to advance projects from their capital improvement plans to their capital budgets. Moreover, the article concludes that growth in cities' own-source-revenue-generating capacity and transfers from carryover or ending balances from earlier years, rather than debt issuances and intergovernmental aid, seem to be the most important fuel for the remarkable growth rate in capital spending.
The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina

We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default induced by legal rulings in the case of Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital. We find that a 10% increase in the probability of default causes a 6% decline in the value of Argentine equities and a 1% depreciation of a measure of the exchange rate. We examine the channels through which a sovereign default may affect the economy.
Incidence and impact of land conflict in Uganda

While there is a large, though inconclusive, literature on the impact of land titles in Africa, little attention has been devoted to the study of land conflict, despite evidence on increasing incidence of such conflicts. The authors use data from Uganda to explore who is affected by land conflicts, whether recent legal changes have helped to reduce their incidence, and to assess their impact on productivity. Results indicate that female-headed households and widows are particularly affected and that the passage of the 1998 Land Act has failed to reduce the number of pending land conflicts. The authors also find evidence of a significant and quantitatively large productivity-reducing impact of land conflicts. This suggests that, especially in Africa, attention to land-related conflicts and exploration of ways to prevent and speedily resolve them would be an important area for policy as well as research.
Constraining the Modified Newtonian Dynamics from spherically symmetrical hydrodynamic accretion

The MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is an alternative to the dark matter assumption that can explain the observed flat rotation curve of galaxies. Here hydrodynamic accretion is considered to critically check the consistency and to constrain the physical interpretation of this theory. It is found that, in case of spherically symmetrical hydrodynamic accretion, the modified Euler's equation has real solution if the interpretation is assumed to be a modification of the law of dynamics. There is no real solution if it is assumed to be an acceleration-scale-dependent modification of the gravitational law. With the modified Euler's equation, the steady-state mass accretion rate is found to change up to ∼ 15 per cent. The astrophysical and cosmological implications of these results are also discussed.
The Nature of Giving Time to Your Child’s School

How do households view contributions of time (via volunteering/fundraising) to their children’s schools? Time contributions produce a public good (improved school quality for all students) and private benefits (e.g., better class placement). If private benefits increase with number of own children at a school and households value private benefits, then the level of contribution should be affected by the number of own children enrolled at a single school. Using a nationally representative sample of more than 2,500 multichild households, I find that time contributions have a statistically significant relationship with number of own children enrolled in the same school. For example, households with multiple children at the same school have a 13 percentage points higher propensity to volunteer at the school than households with a single child in each school. This result implies that private benefits have a strong influence on the parents’ decision to contribute time to their children’s schools.
Children and Law

Abstract This article offers a broad survey of the multiple ways law governs children's lives. The legal regulation of children is neither a subset of family law nor a limited set of exceptions to the legal regulation of persons generally. Law instead creates a legal category of child and governs that category differently than it governs adults across many spheres, including the home, schools, child welfare systems, juvenile justice institutions, and the market. The article analyzes the justifications and effects of this legal approach, highlighting the ways law determine whether parents or state actors may exercise authority over children.
Nonparametric filtering of conditional state-price densities

Abstract This paper studies the use of noisy high-frequency data to estimate the time-varying state-price density implicit in European option prices. A dynamic kernel estimator of the conditional pricing function and its derivatives is proposed that can be used for model-free risk measurement. Infill asymptotic theory is derived that applies when the pricing function is either smoothly varying or driven by diffusive state variables. Trading times and moneyness levels are modeled by marked point processes that capture intraday trading patterns. A simulation study investigates the performance of the estimator using a varying plug-in bandwidth in various scenarios. Empirical analysis using S&P 500 E-mini European option quotes reveals significant time-variation at intraday frequencies. An application towards delta- and minimum variance-hedging further illustrates the use of the estimator.
Protecting Citizen Journalists: Why Congress Should Adopt a Broad Federal Shield Law

This Comment argues that Congress should enact a broad federal shield law that would cover many citizen journalists. Specifically, it recommends that Congress follow the prudent approach to the reporter's privilege that New Jersey and California have already taken. This approach would strike an appropriate balance between encouraging access to information and maintaining effective law enforcement.
Financial Literacy around the World: An Overview

In an increasingly risky and globalized marketplace, people must be able to make well-informed financial decisions. New international research demonstrates that financial illiteracy is widespread in both well-developed and rapidly changing markets. Women are less financially literate than men, the young and the old are less financially literate than the middle-aged, and more educated people are more financially knowledgeable. Most importantly, the financially literate are more likely to plan for retirement. Instrumental variables estimates show that the effects of financial literacy on retirement planning tend to be underestimated. In sum, around the world, financial literacy is critical to retirement security.
An Argument on the Record for More Federal Judgeships

A case is made for increasing the number of federal judges. The author uses the loss of judge involvement in decision-making to begin his argument. The discussion then addresses the arguments against increasing federal judgeships.
OPTIMAL AND NEAR OPTIMAL CONTROL OF A TWO‐PART‐TYPE STOCHASTIC MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH DYNAMIC SETUPS

This paper deals with a manufacturing system consisting of a single machine subject to random failures and repairs. The machine can produce two types of parts. When the production is switched from one part type to the other, a random setup time is incurred at a constant cost rate. The objective is to track the demand, while keeping the work-in-process as close as possible to zero for both products. The problem is formulated as an optimal stochastic control problem. The optimal policy is obtained numerically by discretizing the continuous time continuous state opti-mality conditions using a Markov chain approximation technique. The discretized optimality conditions are shown to correspond to an infinite horizon, discrete time, discrete state dynamic programming problem. The optimal setup policy is shown to have two different structures depending on the parameters of the system. A heuristic policy is proposed to approximate the optimal setup policy. Simulation results show that the heuristic policy is a very good approximation for sufficiently reliable systems.
An empirical investigation of underpricing in Chinese IPOs

Abstract We study the cross-section pattern of underpricing of Chinese initial public offerings (IPOs), using data of 308 firm-commitment new issues from January 1, 1987 through December 31, 1995. We find that the cross-section pattern of underpricing can be explained in terms of a separating equilibrium under asymmetric information in which underpricing is a strategy for firms to signal their value to investors. The firms subsequently recoup the costs of underpricing when they go back to the market with seasoned equity offerings. We also investigate the claim that IPO underpricing is primarily explainable as a means of bribing bureaucrats and the hypothesis that various lottery mechanisms for allocation of IPO shares have exacerbated underpricing. Finally, we find that differences in initial returns between A and B shares can be explained by the differences in domestic and foreign investors' investment opportunities and investment sentiments.
Global Diffusion of ISO 9000 Certification Through Supply Chains

The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards is widely diffused, with more than 560,000 sites certified in 152 countries as of December 2003. Anecdotal evidence suggests that global supply chains contributed to this diffusion, in the following sense. Firms in Europe were the first to seek ISO 9000 certification in large numbers. They then required their suppliers, including those abroad, to do likewise. Once the standard had thus entered other countries, it spread beyond those firms immediately exporting to Europe to be adopted by many other firms in those same countries. This paper empirically examines the validity of this view of the role of supply chains in global diffusion of ISO 9000. To do so, we decompose the statement “supply chains contributed to the global diffusion of ISO 9000” into a series of four requirements that must be met for the original statement to be supported. We then use firm-level data from a global survey of more than 5,000 firms in nine countries to test the hypotheses that correspond to these requirements. Our findings are consistent with the view that part of the global diffusion of ISO 9000 did move upstream in global supply chains. In short, this means that firms that export goods or services to a particular country may simultaneously be importing that country's management practices. We conclude by suggesting how these findings might form the basis for future research on the environmental management systems standard ISO 14000.
Accounting Discretion, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance*

We investigate whether accounting discretion is (i) abused by opportunistic managers who exploit lax governance structures, or (ii) used by managers in a manner consistent with efficient contracting and shareholder value-maximization. Prior research documents an association between accounting discretion and poor governance quality and concludes that such evidence is consistent with abuse of the latitude allowed by accounting rules. We argue that this interpretation may be premature because, if such association is indeed evidence of opportunism, we ought to observe subsequent poor performance, ceteris paribus. Following Core et al. (1999) we conduct our analysis in two stages. In the first stage, we confirm and extent prior literature and document a link between poor governance and managers’ accounting discretion. However, in the second stage we fail to detect a negative association between accounting discretion attributable to poor governance and subsequent firm performance. This suggests that, on average, in our relatively large sample, managers do not abuse accounting discretion at the expense of firms’ shareholders. Rather, we find some evidence that discretion due to poor governance is positively associated with future operating cash flows and ROA, which suggests that shareholders may benefit from earnings management, perhaps because it signals future performance. *Corresponding author: Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708; Tel: (919) 660 7859; Fax: (919) 660 7971; E-mail: vmohan@duke.edu. The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions offered by Patty Dechow, Hemang Desai, Mark DeFond, Ron Dye, Jennifer Francis, Wayne Guay, Rebecca Hann, Michelle Hanlon, Hamid Mehran, D.J. Nanda, Karen Nelson, Per Olsson, Scott Richardson, Katherine Schipper, Terry Shevlin, Doug Skinner, K.R. Subramanyam and workshop participants at Duke University, University of Southern California, Washington University at St. Louis, 2003 Summer Symposium at the London Business School, 2003 European Finance Association meetings at Glasgow, 2003 Financial Economics and Accounting conference at Indiana University, Bloomington and the 2004 mid year Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS) meetings at Austin. We thank Li Xu for research assistance. We acknowledge financial support from the Herbert O. Whitten Professorship, the Accounting Development Fund and the Business School Research Fund at the University of Washington, and the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
Portfolio Manager Ownership and Mutual Fund Performance

This paper examines the association between a mutual fund manager's personal fund investment and mutual fund performance. From a data set of newly released managerial ownership disclosures, I find that fund ownership levels are diverse and, in many instances, quite large. Mutual fund returns are increasing in the level of managerial investment, consistent with personal ownership realigning decision-maker and shareholder interests. Also consistent with the reduction of agency costs, I find that managerial ownership is inversely related to fund turnover. However, there is no evidence of an association between managerial ownership and a mutual fund's tax burden.
Pricing financial services innovations

The number of innovative financial solutions introduced to markets has grown considerably in the past decade owing to emerging digital technologies, deregulation and market fragmentation. Examples are abundant in the worldwide markets for insurance, credit products and transaction processing services. A question of growing interest is how firms should price these innovations. The optimal introductory pricing of financial innovations may vary as a function of factors such as price sensitivity of the market and competitors’ ability to introduce competing financial solutions. In this article, we examine the role of these factors in the optimal pricing of a financial innovation. Using an agent-based simulation framework, introductory pricing strategies that maximize profitability under various market conditions are identified. Results indicate that lower levels of market price sensitivity and longer time horizons for competitive entry create pricing opportunities for financial innovators. However, the relationship becomes more complex as market price sensitivity increases or competitive market entry becomes more immediate. Detailed recommendations for optimal pricing of financial innovations under various market conditions are provided, and the article concludes with strategic recommendations for pricing innovative financial services.
An African Growth Trap: Production Technology and the Time-Consistency of Agricultural Taxation, R&D and Investment*

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods, when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? The authors posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R&D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates depend on the initial cost structure. It is found that in many (but not all) African countries, low tax/high investment regimes would be time-inconsistent, primarily because production technology requires relatively large sunk costs. For pro-growth policies to become sustainable, new political commitment mechanisms or new production techniques would be needed.
COVID-19 and Global Income Inequality

There is a widespread belief that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased global income inequality, reducing per capita incomes by more in poor countries than in rich. This supposition is reasonable but false. Rich countries have experienced more deaths per head than have poor countries, their better health systems, higher incomes, more capable governments and better preparedness notwithstanding. The US did worse than some rich countries but better than several others. Countries with more deaths saw larger declines in GDP per capita. At least after the fact, fewer deaths meant more income. As a result, per capita incomes fell by more in higher-income countries. Country by country, international income inequality decreased. When countries are weighted by population, international income inequality increased, in line with the original intuition. This was largely because Indian GDP fell and because the disequalizing effect of declining Indian incomes was not offset by rising incomes in China, which is no longer a globally poor country. That these findings are a result of the pandemic is supported by comparing global inequality using IMF forecasts in October 2019 and October 2020. These results concern GDP per capita and say little or nothing about the global distribution of living standards, let alone about the global distribution of suffering during the first year of the pandemic.
The Power of Opaque Products in Pricing

We study the power of selling opaque products, that is, products where a feature (such as color) is hidden from the customer until after purchase. Opaque products, which are sold with a price disco...
The Stock-Bond Correlation

Investors rely on the stock-bond correlation for a variety of tasks, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. Most investors estimate the stock–bond correlation simply by extrapolating the historical correlation of monthly returns; they assume that this correlation best characterizes the correlation of future annual or multiyear returns, but this approach is decidedly unreliable. The authors introduce four innovations for generating a reliable prediction of the stock-bond correlation. First, they show how to represent the correlation of single-period cumulative stock and bond returns in a way that captures how the returns drift during the period. Second, they identify fundamental predictors of the stock-bond correlation. Third, they model the stock–bond correlation as a function of the path of some fundamental predictors rather than single observations. Finally, they censor their sample to include only relevant observations, in which relevance has a precise mathematical definition. TOPICS:Portfolio management/multi-asset allocation, risk management, statistical methods Key Findings ▪ The stock-bond correlation is a critical component of many investment activities, such as forming optimal portfolios, designing hedging strategies, and assessing risk. ▪ Most investors estimate the correlation of longer-interval returns by extrapolating the correlation of past shorter-interval returns, but this approach is decidedly unreliable. ▪ By applying recent advances in quantitative methods, it is possible to generate reliable predictions of the correlation of longer-horizon stock and bond returns.
Why is there money? Endogenous derivation of 'money' as the most liquid asset: a class of examples*

The monetary character of trade, use of a common medium of exchange, is shown to be an outcome of an economic general equilibrium. Monetary structure can be derived from price theory in a modified Arrow-Debreu model. Two constructs are added: transaction costs and market segmentation in trading posts (with a separate budget constraint at each transaction). Commodity money arises endogenously as the most liquid (lowest transaction cost) asset. Government-issued fiat money has a positive equilibrium value from its acceptability for tax payments. Scale economies in transaction cost account for uniqueness of the (fiat or commodity) money in equilibrium.
Availability, recency, and sophistication in the repurchasing behavior of retail investors.

Abstract When determining a stock to buy, Strahilevitz et al. (2011) demonstrate that individual investors often repurchase a stock previously traded for a profit as a learning process. When evaluating a decision, people use the most available information that comes to mind. We posit that the most recently sold stocks are the most salient. Our analysis reveals that the presence of another more recently sold stock decreases a household’s propensity to repurchase a different stock by 23%. This recency effect dominates the impact of prior profitability on the repurchasing decision. The repurchase activity of investors appears to be sub-optimal, partially due to commission costs and under-diversification of portfolios, which is magnified for households repurchasing at higher frequencies. More sophisticated investors demonstrate less of this behavior.
Transient Temperature Response Modeling in IAMs: The Effects of Over Simplification on the SCC

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) couple representations of the natural climate system with models of the global economy to capture interactions that are important for the evaluation of potential climate and energy policies. The U.S. federal government currently uses such models to derive the benefits of carbon mitigation policies through estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC). To remain tractable these models often utilize highly simplified representations of complex natural, social, and economic systems. This makes IAMs susceptible to oversimplification by failing to capture key features of the underlying system that are important for policy analysis. In this paper we focus on one area in which these models appear to have fallen into such a trap. We consider three prominent IAMs, DICE, FUND, and PAGE, and examine the way in which these models represent the transient temperature response to increases in radiative forcing. We compare the highly simplified temperature response models in these IAMs to two upwelling diffusion energy balance models that better reflect the progressive uptake of heat by the deep ocean. We find that all three IAMs are unable to fully capture important characteristics in the temporal dynamics of temperature response, especially in the case of high equilibrium climate sensitivity. This has serious implications given that these models are often run with distributions for the equilibrium climate sensitivity that contain a positive probability for such states of the world. We find that all else equal the temperature response function utilized in the FUND model results in estimates of the expected SCC that are up to 25% lower than those derived with the more realistic climate models, while the functions used in DICE and PAGE lead to expected SCC estimates up to 40% and 50% higher, respectively.
Constitutional Change in the 21st Century: A New Debate over the Spending Power

The author offers his views on the future of the federal spending power debate in Canada. First, he explores the original purposes of Canada’s 19th century federal constitution and its evolution in the 20th century in response to a changed sense of what a modern state should be and Canada’s place in the world. He contends that the debates over the federal spending power grow out of the friction between Canada’s 19th century political constitution and its 20th century fiscal constitution. Turning to the 21st century, the author posits that demographic shifts will drive future debates about the federal spending power. These shifts will bring political representation to the fore and raise issues about the appropriate role of federal spending on economic and social policy.
Rationality, political economy, and fiscal responsibility: wrestling with tragedy on the fiscal commons

The continuing budget deficits and accumulating public debt that commonly plagues western democracies reflects a clash between two rationalities regarding human governance: one of private property and its conventions and one of common property and its procedural framework. Democratic budgeting creates a form of fiscal commons whose governance is subject to the tragic outcomes depicted by Garret Hardin (in Science 162:1243–1248, 1968). To be sure, tragedy can be avoided as Elinor Ostrom (1990) explains, but only to the extent that the fiscal commons is governed in a manner consonant with Antonio De Viti de Marco’s (1936) model of the cooperative state. While the tragedy of the commons that results from this tectonic clash is an inherent feature of democratic political economy, that tragedy can nonetheless be limited through reasserting the conventions and institutions of a constitution of liberty.
New Adolescent Money Attitude Scales: Entitlement and Conscientiousness.

The development of two new money-attitude scales measuring entitlement and conscientiousness in adolescents are described. The scales were developed through student and focus group input and from a review of literature on entitlement and conscientiousness as a new adolescent financial education curriculum was being developed. The findings from 265 high school students resulted in a 6-item measure of entitlement, α = .76, and a 4-item measure of conscientiousness, α = .82. There was strong evidence for consistency of items for each scale loading well on single factors and maintaining reliability across a variety of demographic subgroups. The scales are distinct from, and yet complement existing money-attitude scales, such as conspicuous consumption, power-prestige, and financial prudence, and thus offer new tools for research on adolescent economic socialization.
Social Capital And Community Governance

Community governance is the set of small group social interactions that, with market and state, determine economic outcomes. We argue (i) community governance addresses some common market and state failures but typically relies on insider-outsider distinctions that may be morally repugnant and economically costly; (ii) the individual motivations supporting community governance are not captured by either selfishness or altruism; (iii) communities, markets and states are complements, not substitutes; (iv) when poorly designed, markets and states crowd out communities; (v) some distributions of property rights are better than others at fostering community governance; and (vi) communities will probably increase in importance in the future.
Is all disaggregation good for investors? Evidence from earnings announcements

Research suggests that greater earnings disaggregation in financial statements leads to favorable market outcomes. This perspective is based on a presumption that the disaggregation separates earnings components with heterogeneous characteristics. We hypothesize that the disaggregation of homogeneous earnings components is associated with greater investor disagreement and a less efficient market response to the earnings announcement. We estimate persistence regressions at the industry level and classify earnings components with persistence that differs significantly from the persistence of sales as heterogeneous and components with persistence that does not differ from the persistence of sales as homogeneous. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find a significant positive relation between the level of homogeneous earnings disaggregation and investor disagreement around earnings announcements. We also find significantly greater post-earnings announcement drift after earnings announcements with greater homogeneous earnings disaggregation. This evidence is consistent with homogeneous earnings disaggregation hindering investors’ ability to impound earnings information into price efficiently.
E‐Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

Information and communication technology standards are increasingly intertwined with functions that are paradigmatic responsibilities of governments. The degree of openness in technical standards can have public policy implications in several areas: a nation's innovation and competition policy; the ability of governments to efficiently and cost effectively perform services such as national security, disaster response, and e-Health administration; and the ways in which standards serve as a form of regulation making decisions such as the extent of user privacy on the Internet. Because of these possible policy implications, governments have a vested interest in promoting open technical standards adhering to principles of transparency, cost efficiency, and interoperability. This paper examines various possibilities for governments to engage with information and communication technology standardization (e.g., development, regulation, funding, adoption) and ultimately recommends that governments, as significant parts of technology markets, can exert market influence, as well as provide efficient e-Governance functions, through procurement policies that promote open standards, often through electronic government interoperability frameworks (e-GIFs) specifying information technology standards for e-Governance infrastructures. These procurement policies are the least interventionist of possible roles for governments in standardization because they do not mandate that private industry adopt particular standards and do not intervene directly in the standards-development process. Drawing from roundtable discussions with government officials at the United Nations Development Programme's Global Meeting on Government Interoperability Frameworks in Brazil, this paper surveys a number of existing government interoperability frameworks (Brazil, the European Union, Japan, and South Africa) and recommends best practices for these emerging e-Governance frameworks.
Student success prediction in MOOCs

Predictive models of student success in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a critical component of effective content personalization and adaptive interventions. In this article we review the state of the art in predictive models of student success in MOOCs and present a categorization of MOOC research according to the predictors (features), prediction (outcomes), and underlying theoretical model. We critically survey work across each category, providing data on the raw data source, feature engineering, statistical model, evaluation method, prediction architecture, and other aspects of these experiments. Such a review is particularly useful given the rapid expansion of predictive modeling research in MOOCs since the emergence of major MOOC platforms in 2012. This survey reveals several key methodological gaps, which include extensive filtering of experimental subpopulations, ineffective student model evaluation, and the use of experimental data which would be unavailable for real-world student success prediction and intervention, which is the ultimate goal of such models. Finally, we highlight opportunities for future research, which include temporal modeling, research bridging predictive and explanatory student models, work which contributes to learning theory, and evaluating long-term learner success in MOOCs.
Measuring income tax accrual quality

We develop and validate a measure of tax accrual quality. Tax accrual quality captures variation in the extent to which the income tax accrual maps into income tax-related cash flows, with lower variation indicating a higher quality tax accrual. Low tax accrual quality arises from (1) management estimation error and (2) financial reporting standards that lead to differences between income tax expense and income tax cash flows not captured by deferred tax assets and liabilities. We validate our tax accrual quality measure by showing it is associated with firm characteristics that capture both constructs and by demonstrating it predicts future tax-related restatements and internal control material weaknesses. We illustrate the importance of our measure by showing that investors view tax expense as more informative in firms with better tax accrual quality. Future researchers can use tax accrual quality to address questions related to estimation error in the income tax account.
The Future of Federal Law Clerk Hiring

The market for federal law clerks has been upended. Beginning in 2003, the Federal Judges Law Clerk Hiring Plan was implemented to regulate clerkship hiring. According to the Plan, a judge could not interview or hire a potential law clerk before the beginning of the applicant’s third year of law school. The Plan, however, never worked well, constantly got worse, and has now officially collapsed. Across the country, clerkship hiring once again regularly occurs during the second year of law school.This Article addresses the rise and inevitable fall of the Plan. In particular, it submits that the Plan never had a realistic chance of success because coordinated action in a competitive market is difficult to maintain, especially without an effective enforcement mechanism to punish noncompliance. Here, the Plan collapsed because its enforcement mechanism was far too weak. And the reason why the Plan did not have a more effective enforcement mechanism was no accident: any mechanism that could work would require judges to give up too much.Against that backdrop, this Article explains what clerkship hiring will likely look like in the future. Importantly, given the steep costs of an effective enforcement mechanism, this Article contends that it is unlikely that a new hiring plan will be adopted. This is especially true because modern trends are already beginning to mitigate the concerns associated with an unregulated clerkship market.
Surge Pricing and Its Spatial Supply Response

We consider the pricing problem faced by a revenue-maximizing platform matching price-sensitive customers to flexible supply units within a geographic area. This can be interpreted as the problem f...
Higher order Greeks.

In the original Black-Scholes pricing framework, a continuously rebalanced delta hedge of an option against its underlying stock produces a perfectly risk free position. But in the real world, a basic delta hedge is still exposed to quite a lot of risk because rebalancing can only be done at discrete intervals, volatility is stochastically time-varying, and underlying assets do not follow true lognormal diffusions. Discrete rebalancing after a non-marginal price change makes gamma an important extra risk factor and with fluctuating implied volatility, vega becomes another one. This makes delta-gamma-vega hedging the next level of option risk management. But unhedged risk still remains. In this paper, Ederington and Guan investigate whether option risk factors measured by other second and third order derivatives of the option pricing function can capture this residual risk, and if so, which are the most important of these „higher order Greeks.” They find that, at least for S&P 500 index futures options, the additional risk factors can explain a substantial portion of the residual risk in a delta-gamma-vega hedge. A key finding is that an option9s sensitivity to the higher order Greeks depends heavily on its moneyness, with several Greek letter risks that are unimportant for at the money options becoming much more relevant for out of the money contracts. They also show that a hedge strategy that neutralizes these additional factors can lower residual risk by an order of magnitude below that of a delta-gamma-vega hedge.
Rotational internal audit programs and financial reporting quality: Do compensating controls help?

A report from the Institute of Internal Auditors finds that a majority of Fortune 500 companies systematically rotate internal auditors out of the internal audit function and into operational management (IIA, 2009a). We use semi-structured interviews with 11 chief audit executives and 2 audit committee chairmen to develop an initial framework focusing on how this practice affects financial reporting quality. We then test these associations with archival data and find that companies that use a rotational staffing model for the internal audit function have significantly lower financial reporting quality than companies that do not. However, we find that several compensating controls identified from the interviews (e.g., consistency of IAF leadership or supervision, audit committee oversight, and management oversight and direction) can reduce this adverse financial reporting effect. We conclude that companies should consider the potential costs of using a rotational staffing model in the internal audit function and, if adopting this practice, should ensure the appropriate compensating controls are in place to mitigate such costs.
Incredible Women: Sexual Violence and the Credibility Discount

Credibility is central to the legal treatment of sexual violence, as epitomized by the iconic “he said/she said” contest. Over time, the resolution of competing factual accounts has evidenced a deeply skeptical orientation toward rape accusers. This incredulous stance remains firmly lodged, having migrated from formal legal rules to informal practices, with much the same result — an enduring system of disbelief. Introducing the concept of “credibility discounting” helps to explain the dominant feature of our legal response to rape. Although false reports of rape are uncommon, law enforcement officers tend to default to doubt when women allege sexual assault, resulting in curtailed investigations along with infrequent arrests and prosecutions. Credibility discounts, which are meted out at every stage of the criminal process, involve downgrades both to trustworthiness (corresponding to testimonial injustice) and to plausibility (corresponding to hermeneutical injustice). By conceptualizing prejudiced disbelief as a distinct failure of justice, one deserving of separate consideration, we may begin to grasp the full implications of credibility discounting, beyond faulty criminal justice outcomes. Attending to this failure of epistemic justice on its own terms advances a conversation about how best to reform institutions so that credibility judgments do not perpetuate inequality. To this end, credibility discounting should count as actionable discrimination. Under certain conditions, moreover, this recognition raises constitutional concerns. When rape victims confront a law enforcement regime predisposed to dismiss their complaints, they are effectively denied the protective resources of the state.
Local perspectives and global archetypes in scenario development

Contrasting social-ecological scenarios can help stakeholders envision potential futures and navigate change and uncertainty. Scenario developers integrate stakeholder perceptions into storylines to increase scenario relevance and plausibility while relying on archetypes of change from scenario literature to enrich narratives. This research examines the contributions of local perspectives and global archetypes to scenario development through a case study of a regional scenario project, Yahara 2070, in Wisconsin, USA. Interviews with 50 Yahara watershed stakeholders and 5 members of the project's scenario development team were examined to compare themes from scenario archetypes with local perspectives on how change is expected to occur. We next examined how these two sources of inspiration for trajectories of change were used in the development of the Yahara 2070 scenarios. Both global archetypes and local stakeholders emphasized social values, market forces, and policy reform as influences in determining the future, which were reflected in Yahara 2070. However, stakeholders were less likely to mention institutional breakdown, an important theme from the global scenarios literature that was included in Yahara 2070. This research offers a new approach to analyzing similarities and differences between scenarios’ narratives and local perspectives. Scenario development may involve tensions between the goals of reflecting stakeholder views and including narratives from the global scenarios literature that may be useful for creating divergent model trajectories and addressing dramatic change into the future. To improve scenario development, scenario projects should document the development process in academic and nonacademic venues, explicitly highlighting sources and constraints in storyline development.
The effects of endowment size and strategy method on third party punishment

Numerous experiments have shown that people often engage in third-party punishment (3PP) of selfish behavior. This evidence has been used to argue that people respond to selfishness with anger, and get utility from punishing those who mistreat others. Elements of the standard 3PP experimental design, however, allow alternative explanations: it has been argued that 3PP could be motivated by envy (as selfish dictators earn high payoffs), or could be influenced by the use of the strategy method (which is known to influence second-party punishment). Here we test these alternatives by varying the third party’s endowment and the use of the strategy method, and measuring punishment. We find that while third parties do report more envy when they have lower endowments, neither manipulation significantly affects punishment. We also show that punishment is associated with ratings of anger but not of envy. Thus, our results suggest that 3PP is not an artifact of self-focused envy or use of the strategy method. Instead, our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that 3PP is motivated by anger.