cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Evolving Definition of the Refugee in Contemporary International Law

Many scholars of international refugee law assert that there is no definition of refugee under international law except that given in the Refugee Convention. This assertion, however, overlooks the dynamic way that the Refugee Convention is interpreted and is usually made without a detailed analysis of customary international law. This article attempts to address this shortcoming in the literature by examining conventional and customary international law contributing to the contemporary definition of refugee. Furthermore, it will attempt to do this is an even-handed manner, concluding that the definition has expanded in favor of claimants in some aspects, but, actually, contracted against the favor of claimants in others. First, the article will examine the definition of refugee under the Refugee Convention, especially the evolving technique for interpreting the Convention, to determine whether the definition has outgrown its conventional shell. Second, the article will undertake a comprehensive analysis of state practice and opinio juris on this question, examining the most up-to-date sources. In particular, it will reflect on the role of specially interested or specially affected states in the formation of customary international law and the growth of “subsidiary” protection. Also the article will consider the contribution of the practice and opinio juris of international organizations in the frame of the contemporary international law’s understanding of the contribution international organizations can make. Lastly, the article will look at the opposite side of the coin: the ways in which customary international law may have narrowed the definition beyond the terms of the Refugee Convention. It will conclude by proposing the new definition of a refugee under conventional and customary international law based on the findings.
HOW A STATUTE APPLIES

This essay presents a new theory of statutory application that is superior to two competitors. One of the competitors claims that statutory directives apply to act-tokens fitting the legislature's intention. The other holds that statutes apply to act-tokens that are of the genuine kinds named by the classifying words. These theories solve certain problems badly or not at all, respectively: (1) accounting for the capacity of statutes for epistemic guidance; and (2) avoiding literalism. Both do a limited job of accounting for the rationality of statutory promulgation. The theory developed here, social salience theory, does better on all counts. According to social salience theory, the default position is that statutes apply to act-tokens that are socially salient, given the linguistic and social contexts. The departure from that position is also social, produced by conventions to defer to experts on the statute's applications to particular cases.
Estimation of Peer Effects in Endogenous Social Networks: Control Function Approach

We propose methods of estimating the linear-in-means model of peer effects in which the peer group, defined by a social network, is endogenous in the outcome equation for peer effects. Endogeneity ...
Polycentricity, Self-governance, and the Art & Science of Association

When considered as a unified project, the Ostroms’ themes of polycentricity, self-governance, and the art and science of association have strong intellectual roots and connections with Austrian economics. In this paper, we show the close relationship between the Ostroms and the Austrians. We then describe how contemporary Austrian economists can be inspired and can further the work of the Ostroms in the areas of civil societies and self-governing communities, the use of fieldwork and case studies, and public economies and coproduction. Although there are perceived tensions between the Ostroms and the Austrians, we contend that these can be reconciled and pursued as fruitful areas of research.
"The Birth of Death": Stillborn Birth Certificates and the Problem for Law

Stillbirth is a confounding event, a reproductive moment that at once combines birth and death. This Essay discusses the complications of this simultaneity as a social experience and as a matter of law. While traditionally, stillbirth didn’t count for much on either score, this is no longer the case. Familiarity with fetal life through obstetric ultrasound has transformed stillborn children into participating members of their families long before birth, and this in turn has led to a novel demand on law. Dissatisfied with the issuance of a stillborn death certificate, bereaved parents of stillborn babies have successfully lobbied state legislatures nationwide to issue stillborn birth certificates under newly enacted “Missing Angel Acts.” These Acts raise a perplexing set of questions. While acknowledging the desire of grieving parents to have some form of recognition for their children, it is important to think carefully about just what is being certified in the name of the larger community. How has issuing birth certificates to babies who never lived come to seem a reasonable rather than an eccentric legislative gesture? And importantly, do stillborn birth certificates have implications for other areas of law involving prenatal death, particularly the regulation of abortion?
Subjective recursive expected utility

We axiomatize a subjective version of the recursive expected utility model. This development extends the seminal results of Kreps and Porteus (Econometrica 46:185–200 (1978)) to a subjective framework and provides foundations that are easy to relate to axioms familiar from timeless models of decision making under uncertainty. Our analysis also clarifies what is needed in going from a represention that applies within a single filtration to an across filtration representation.
Multi-method evidence on investors’ reactions to managers’ self-inclusive language

Abstract We investigate the joint effect of managers’ self-inclusive language (SIL) and performance news on investors’ reactions to accounting disclosures. We identify two types of SIL: individual SIL, which includes first-person singular pronouns (e.g., I, me) and collective SIL, which includes first-person plural pronouns (e.g., we, us). When performance news is negative, individual SIL implies that a manager is claiming sole responsibility for the unfavorable event whereas collective SIL and SEL diffuse responsibility. Therefore, we predict higher perceptions of manager credibility for individual SIL relative to collective SIL or self-exclusive language (SEL) when performance news is negative, which, in turn, increase investment judgments. We use a between-subjects experiment to test our predictions. Results show higher perceptions of manager credibility and higher investment judgments for individual SIL relative to collective SIL or SEL when performance news is negative. Results of a maximum likelihood estimation suggest that perceptions of manager credibility mediate the effect of individual SIL on investment judgments, supporting the notion that individual SIL exerts an indirect effect on investment judgments. We supplement experimental evidence with an analysis of managers’ SIL in a large sample of earnings conference calls. We document a positive (negative) market reaction to individual (collective) SIL when performance news is negative, consistent with our Hypothesis. We also find a positive market reaction to individual SIL when news is positive. Overall, our study offers multi-method evidence of the impact of a subtle and easily overlooked component of managers’ language on investors’ judgments.
Factors Affecting Residential Property Development Patterns

This article is the winner of the Real Estate Development manuscript prize (sponsored by the Urban Land Institute) presented at the 2002 American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting.This study uses ...
Computing Inequality: Have Computers Changed the Labor Market?

This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U. S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong and persistent growth in relative demand favoring college graduates. Rapid skill upgrading within detailed industries accounts for most of the growth in the relative demand for college workers, particularly since 1970. Analyses of four data sets indicate that the rate of skill upgrading has been greater in more computer-intensive industries.
Performance Pay and Productivity

Much of the theory in personnel economics relates to effects of monetary incentives on output, but the theory was untested because appropriate data were unavailable. A new data set for the Safelite Glass Corporation tests the predictions that average productivity will rise, the firm will attract a more able workforce, and variance in output across individuals at the firm will rise when it shifts to piece rates. In Safelite, productivity effects amount to a 44-percent increase in output per worker. This firm apparently had selected a suboptimal compensation system, as profits also increased with the change.
The Simple Analytics of Helicopter Money: Why It Works—Always

The author provides a rigorous analysis of Milton Friedman’s parable of the ‘helicopter’ drop of money – a permanent/irreversible increase in the nominal stock of fiat base money rate which respects the intertemporal budget constraint of the consolidated Central Bank and Treasury – the State. Examples are a temporary fiscal stimulus funded permanently through an increase in the stock of base money and permanent QE – an irreversible, monetized open market purchase by the Central Bank of non-monetary sovereign – debt. Three conditions must be satisfied for helicopter money always to boost aggregate demand. First, there must be benefits from holding fiat base money other than its pecuniary rate of return. Second, fiat base money is irredeemable – viewed as an asset by the holder but not as a liability by the issuer. Third, the price of money is positive. Given these three conditions, there always exists – even in a permanent liquidity trap – a combined monetary and fiscal policy action that boosts private demand – in principle without limit. Deflation, ‘lowflation’ and secular stagnation are therefore unnecessary. They are policy choices.
A Theory of Perceived Risk and Attractiveness

Abstract People judged both the attractiveness and risk of lotteries to win or lose money. The lotteries were designed to test whether risk and attractiveness judgments show systematic deviations from the simple sum of probability-by-utility-products analogous to (S)EU theory. Our results led to an alternative combination rule for probability and outcome information, with a relative weight averaging component and a configural (i.e., sign- or rank-dependent) probability weighting component. Ratings of risk and attractiveness were negatively correlated, but the two tasks showed systematic differences in the rank order of judgments. Both judgments could be fit by the same configural relative weight averaging model, but with different parameters (especially the sign-dependent probability weighting functions). Risk judgments were more sensitive to the probability of losses and zero outcomes compared to attractiveness judgments, which were more sensitive to the probability of gains. There were individual differences on the extent of this difference in probability weights between risk and attractiveness judgments.
The Osmosis Model for Studying Offshore Business Process Outsourcing

Although offshore BPO has been a focus of considerable attention in popular press, there is a serious dearth of academic research on this area. This paper first establishes that offshore BPO functions in the same manner as osmosis. We then draw upon constructs and concepts in osmosis to develop theoretical understanding of the factors that drive the offshore BPO. Managerial and policy implications are discussed and directions for further research have been suggested.
The topology of Kuranishi atlases

Kuranishi structures were introduced in the 1990s by Fukaya and Ono for the purpose of assigning a virtual cycle to moduli spaces of pseudoholomorphic curves that cannot be regularized by geometric methods. Starting from the same core idea (patching local finite-dimensional reductions), we develop a theory of topological Kuranishi atlases and cobordisms that transparently resolves algebraic and topological challenges in this virtual regularization approach. It applies to any Kuranishi-type setting, for example, atlases with isotropy, boundary and corners, or lack of differentiable structure.
Enterprise Risk Management: Theory and Practice

The Chief Risk Officer of Nationwide Insurance teams up with a distinguished academic to discuss the benefits and challenges associated with the design and implementation of an enterprise risk management program. The authors begin by arguing that a carefully designed ERM program—one in which all material corporate risks are viewed and managed within a single framework—can be a source of long-run competitive advantage and value through its effects at both a “macro” or company-wide level and a “micro” or business-unit level. At the macro level, ERM enables senior management to identify, measure, and limit to acceptable levels the net exposures faced by the firm. By managing such exposures mainly with the idea of cushioning downside outcomes and protecting the firm's credit rating, ERM helps maintain the firm's access to capital and other resources necessary to implement its strategy and business plan. At the micro level, ERM adds value by ensuring that all material risks are “owned,” and risk-return tradeoffs carefully evaluated, by operating managers and employees throughout the firm. To this end, business unit managers at Nationwide are required to provide information about major risks associated with all new capital projects—information that can then used by senior management to evaluate the marginal impact of the projects on the firm's total risk. And to encourage operating managers to focus on the risk-return tradeoffs in their own businesses, Nationwide's periodic performance evaluations of its business units attempt to refl ect their contributions to total risk by assigning risk-adjusted levels of “imputed” capital on which project managers are expected to earn adequate returns. The second, and by far the larger, part of the article provides an extensive guide to the process and major challenges that arise when implementing ERM, along with an account of Nationwide's approach to dealing with them. Among other issues, the authors discuss how a company should assess its risk “appetite,” measure how much risk it is bearing, and decide which risks to retain and which to transfer to others. Consistent with the principle of comparative advantage it uses to guide such decisions, Nationwide attempts to limit “non-core” exposures, such as interest rate and equity risk, thereby enlarging the firm's capacity to bear the “information-intensive, insurance- specific” risks at the core of its business and competencies.
Does local religiosity matter for bank risk-taking?

We investigate whether local religiosity matters for risk-taking by banks. Banks headquartered in more religious areas exhibit lower stock return volatility, lower tail risk, and lower idiosyncratic risk. They also tend to be farther away from default as measured by their z-scores. But these banks command lower market valuations during normal times. These results stand up to several robustness checks, tests for mitigating endogeneity concerns, and are supported by an analysis of bank CEOs' religiosity. Moreover, banks in more religious areas remain less vulnerable to crises. To reduce risk, these banks grow their assets more slowly, hold safer assets, rely less on non-traditional banking, and provide less incentives to their executives to increase risks. Local religiosity has a more pronounced influence on risk-taking by banks for which local investors and managers are more important. Overall, this paper contributes to the literature by uncovering an important and previously unidentified determinant of risk-taking by banks, namely, religion-induced risk aversion.
Double Marginalization in Performance-Based Advertising: Implications and Solutions

An important current trend in advertising is the replacement of traditional pay-per-exposure (pay-per-impression) pricing models with performance-based mechanisms in which advertisers pay only for measurable actions by consumers. Such pay-per-action (PPA) mechanisms are becoming the predominant method of selling advertising on the Internet. Well-known examples include pay-per-click, pay-per-call, and pay-per-sale. This work highlights an important, and hitherto unrecognized, side effect of PPA advertising. I find that, if the prices of advertised goods are endogenously determined by advertisers to maximize profits net of advertising expenses, PPA mechanisms induce firms to distort the prices of their goods (usually upward) relative to prices that would maximize profits in settings where advertising is sold under pay-per-exposure methods. Upward price distortions reduce both consumer surplus and the joint publisher--advertiser profit, leading to a net reduction in social welfare. They persist in current auction-based PPA mechanisms, such as the ones used by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. In the latter settings they also reduce publisher revenues relative to pay-per-exposure methods. I show that these phenomena constitute a form of double marginalization and discuss a number of enhancements to today's PPA mechanisms that restore equilibrium pricing of advertised goods to efficient levels, improving both consumer surplus as well as the publisher's expected profits. This paper was accepted by Lorin Hitt, information systems.
Meaningful learning and transfer of learning in games played repeatedly without feedback

Abstract Psychologists have long recognized two kinds of learning: one that is relatively shallow and domain-specific; and another that is deeper, producing generalizable insights that transfer across domains. The game theory literature has only recently considered this distinction, and the conditions that stimulate the latter kind of “meaningful” learning in games are still unclear. Three experiments demonstrate that one kind of meaningful learning — acquisition of iterated dominance — occurs in the absence of any feedback. We demonstrate that such feedback-free meaningful learning transfers to new strategically similar games, and that such transfer does not typically occur when initial games are played with feedback. The effects of withholding feedback are similar to, and substitutable with, those produced by requiring players to explain their behavior, a method commonly employed in psychology to increase deliberation. This similarity suggests that withholding feedback encourages deeper thinking about the game in a manner similar to such self-explanation.
The q‐Theory Approach to Understanding the Accrual Anomaly

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize based on q-theory that firms optimally adjust their accruals in response to discount rate changes. A higher discount rate means less profitable investments and lower accruals, and a lower discount rate means more profitable investments and higher accruals. Our evidence supports this optimal investment hypothesis: (1) adding an investment factor into standard factor regressions substantially reduces the magnitude of the accrual anomaly, often to insignificant levels; (2) accruals covary negatively with discount rate estimates from the dividend discounting model, and for the most part, with estimates from the residual income model; (3) accruals with low accounting reliability covary more with capital investment than accruals with high accounting reliability; and (iv) expected returns to accruals-based trading strategies are time-varying, suggesting that the deterioration of the accrual effect in recent years might be temporary and likely to mean-revert in the near future.
The Effect of Institutional Ownership on Payout Policy: Evidence from Index Thresholds

We show that higher institutional ownership causes firms to pay more dividends. Our identification relies on a discontinuity in ownership around Russell index thresholds. Our estimates indicate that a one-percentage-point increase in institutional ownership causes a $7 million (8%) increase in dividends. We also find differences in shareholder proposals and voting patterns that suggest that even nonactivist institutions play an important role in monitoring firm behavior. The effect of institutional ownership on dividends is stronger for firms with higher expected agency costs.
Supply Disruptions, Asymmetric Information, and a Backup Production Option

We study a manufacturer that faces a supplier privileged with private information about supply disruptions. We investigate how risk-management strategies of the manufacturer change and examine whether risk-management tools are more or less valuable in the presence of such asymmetric information. We model a supply chain with one manufacturer and one supplier, in which the supplier's reliability is either high or low and is the supplier's private information. On disruption, the supplier chooses to either pay a penalty to the manufacturer for the shortfall or use backup production to fill the manufacturer's order. Using mechanism design theory, we derive the optimal contract menu offered by the manufacturer. We find that information asymmetry may cause the less reliable supplier type to stop using backup production while the more reliable supplier type continues to use it. Additionally, the manufacturer may stop ordering from the less reliable supplier type altogether. The value of supplier backup production for the manufacturer is not necessarily larger under symmetric information; for the more reliable supplier type, it could be negative. The manufacturer is willing to pay the most for information when supplier backup production is moderately expensive. The value of information may increase as supplier types become uniformly more reliable. Thus, higher reliability need not be a substitute for better information.
Retail Investor Sentiment and Return Comovements

Using a database of more than 1.85 million retail investor transactions over 1991–1996, we show that these trades are systematically correlated—that is, individuals buy (or sell) stocks in concert. Moreover, consistent with noise trader models, we find that systematic retail trading explains return comovements for stocks with high retail concentration (i.e., small-cap, value, lower institutional ownership, and lower-priced stocks), especially if these stocks are also costly to arbitrage. Macroeconomic news and analyst earnings forecast revisions do not explain these results. Collectively, our findings support a role for investor sentiment in the formation of returns.
The impact of technological improvements on developing financial markets: The case of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange

Can a significant technological improvement make an economically justifiable contribution to a financial market's development? The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) incorporated the SETS system from the London Stock Exchange in 2002. It is certain that SETS is a technologically efficient trading system, and it would undoubtedly improve trading in the JSE. We test whether SETS represents a structural break by examining whether there was an increase in the JSE's liquidity, market efficiency and international integration after the introduction of SETS. While SETS is certainly a technological improvement with increased liquidity, it is not a sufficient factor to render it efficient. After the incorporation of SETS, the JSE has become more independent and it now offers better diversification opportunities for international investors.
Ranking Law Schools: A Market Test?

Instead of ranking law schools through statistical aggregations of expert judgments, or by combining a list of heterogeneous factors, it would be possible to rely on a market test, simply by examining student choices. This tournament-type approach would have the large advantage of relying on the widely dispersed information that students actually have; it would also reduce reliance on factors that can be manipulated (and whose manipulation does no good other than to increase rankings). On the other hand, a market test has several problems as a measure of law school quality, partly because cognitive biases and social influences may lead some or many students to make bad choices and thus to participate in the production of inaccurate rankings. I. Experts (and Jobs, Money, and Libraries) Law school rankings are notoriously contentious. Many such rankings are obtained in the following way. Much of the analysis comes from the judgments of a group of experts, who are asked to assess law school quality, in general and along particular dimensions. For example, forty percent of the US News and World Report rankings are generated in this way. Academic reputation, measured by responses of law school deans and faculty, counts for 25% of the total score; reputation among lawyers and judges counts for 15% of the total score. In Brian Leiter’s rankings, faculty quality is measured solely through aggregating surveys, in a way that makes expert judgments crucial. This method is controversial, but there is a great deal of logic to relying on statistical aggregations of expert opinions. When experts are available, it makes sense to obtain a statistical answer from them, rather than to select one or a few. If experts are likely to have relevant information, a statistical group of experts should have a significant advantage over individual experts, just as a statistical group of ordinary people has a * Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, Law School and Department of Political Science, University of Chicago. 1 See http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/bleiter/rankings/rankings03.html
Crossing Over: Why Attorneys (and Judges) Should Not be Able to Cross-Examine Witnesses Regarding Their Immigration Statuses for Impeachment Purposes

You are sitting in an empty bar (in a town you’ve never before visited), drinking a Bacardi with a soft-spoken acquaintance you barely know. After an hour, a third individual walks into the tavern and sits by himself, and you ask your acquaintance who the new man is. ―Be careful of that guy,‖ you are told. ―He is a man with a past.‖ A few minutes later, a fourth person enters the bar; he also sits alone. You ask your acquaintance who this new individual is. ―Be careful of that guy, too,‖ he says. ―He is a man with no past.‖ Which of these two people do you trust less? You are a juror sitting in a courtroom (a place you’ve never visited), hearing an opening statement by a loud-mouthed lawyer you barely know. After an hour, a first witness walks into the courtroom and sits by himself on the witness stand. The lawyer’s cross-examination of the witness implies, ―Be careful of that guy. He is an illegal alien.‖ A few minutes later, a second witness enters the courtroom; he also sits alone on the stand. The lawyer’s cross-examination of the witness implies, ―Be careful of that guy. He cheats on his wife.‖ Which of these two people do you trust less? According to the recent opinion of one federal appellate court, the illegal alien is the answer, and the second line of interrogation is prohibited. In United States v. Almeida-Perez, the Eighth Circuit found that an extensive interrogation into the immigration statuses of defense witnesses was not plain error. The court relied upon First and Second Circuit opinions
What Athletic Achievement Can Teach About Ethics

Athletic achievement exemplifies the nature of classical ethical virtue. Aristotelian virtue grows from self-mastery combined with intentionally learned skills of practice and striving with others to achieve a common purpose. Virtue expresses itself through judgment and action that flow from the integration of cognitive, emotional, perceptual, physical, and relational attributes into pattern recognition and coordinated activity to achieve a purpose. Athletic excellence embodies such integrated judgment and action. Personal, professional, and athletic achievement all express similar structural virtues. Such intentional and virtuous action grows not only from self-discipline but also from self-knowledge and the cognitive commitment to study, learn, and master complex skills. It manifests as the integrated cognitive, emotional, and physical ability to sacrifice and overcome obstacles. Athletic excellence further requires serious commitment to social community and its norms. Athletic achievement demonstrates ...
Getting off the ground: the case of bitcoin

By declaring an item legal tender or making it publicly receivable, governments might generate sufficient demand to determine the medium of exchange. How do private actors launch a new money? There are two views in the literature. The first requires offering an item with a use value to some agents that is distinct from its role as a medium of exchange. The second suggests that agents might coordinate on an intrinsically useless item. With these views in mind, I survey the logs from the original bitcoin forum, bitcoin-list. I find that early participants in the bitcoin community understood the importance of coordination and took steps to coordinate users.
Constitutional Remedies: Reconciling Official Immunity with the Vindication of Rights

A great deal of scholarly attention is devoted to constitutional rights and comparatively little to remedies for their violation. Yet rights without remedies are not worth much, and remedial law does not always facilitate the enforcement of rights, even of constitutional rights. This Article discusses an especially challenging remedial context: suits seeking damages for constitutional wrongs that occurred in the past, that are unlikely to recur, and hence that cannot be remedied by forward-looking injunctive or declaratory relief. Typical fact patterns include charges that the police, prison guards, school administrators, or other officials have engaged in illegal searches and seizures, or fired people on account of protected speech, or deprived them of liberty or property without due process of law, or discriminated against them in violation of equal protection. Because these backward-looking suits bear some resemblance to ordinary tort law, the doctrine is often called “constitutional tort.”This Article examines a well-settled and routine — but destructive and quite unnecessary — consequence of the interplay between the liability rule and the official immunity doctrine. Consider two plaintiffs, Alice and Bob, each of whom sues for damages under § 1983. Suppose that both plaintiffs lose, but for different reasons. Alice establishes a violation of her constitutional rights, but fails because the defendant successfully asserts official immunity. Bob cannot show that his rights were violated in the first place. Despite the difference between their cases, current Supreme Court doctrine directs that Alice and Bob be treated the same. Both go away empty-handed. Under the Court’s approach, the competing goals behind liability and immunity are balanced in the following way: On the one hand, the aim of constitutional tort law is to compensate the plaintiff and to deter violations of rights. But on the other side of the balance, official immunity carries enough weight to override the compensation and deterrence goals. Thus, the official’s successful immunity defense carries the same force as a successful defense on the merits. Both result in total victory for the defense.In this Article, I argue for a different conception of constitutional tort law, in which it is recognized that Alice’s case differs fundamentally from Bob’s. The point is not to question official immunity, a doctrine that has broad support from the Supreme Court. My project is to reconcile official immunity with Alice’s legitimate claim for a remedy.
The British Importation of American Corporate Compliance

Legislators and prosecutors in Britain are reevaluating laws and procedures concerning corporate crime. In an effort to modernize and strengthen corporate criminal laws, British policymakers are examining, and, in some instances, "importing" corporate criminal laws and procedures from the United States. This note examines how British policymakers have looked to the United States for guidance in combating corporate crime, while also positing that American policymakers should learn from the developments in Britain and consider making changes to corporate criminal laws and procedures in light of the developments abroad.Part I of this note examines the development of corporate criminal laws in the United States and Britain. Part II describes how policy makers in Britain have suggested changes to substantive British laws to mimic corporate criminal laws in the United States. Part III compares corporate reform under Deferred and Non-Prosecution Agreements to corporate reform under similar British Compliance Agreements. Part IV describes the likely problems that British prosecutors will face by importing a civil procedure that was designed for use in criminal prosecutions. Finally, Part V describes some of the successes of British Compliance Agreements, and uses the developments in the United Kingdom as a basis to suggest changes in corporate criminal procedures and substantive laws in the United States.
Relative Prices, Inflation and Core Inflation

Empirical evidence on the distribution of relative price changes almost invariably reveals high kurtosis and a tendency toward right-skewness. Simple mixed distribution models including volatile and infrequently adjusted prices can account for these and other common features, such as correlation between the mean and variance of relative prices. In such circumstances, robust measures of central tendency are likely to outperform the mean or standard measures of “core” inflation as indicators of generalized inflation. The analysis also supports the use of geometric averaging in CPI construction and the targeting of the geometric mean inflation rate rather than the Laspeyres mean.
Legal Writing and Academic Support: Timing is Everything

The conventional wisdom is that legal writing and academic support go hand-in-hand. Most law schools assume that struggling students can be reliably identified for academic support through their first-year legal writing course, and that first-year legal writing instructors can fairly easily and effectively provide this support. Indeed, this is the prevailing view in current academic support and legal writing scholarship. Professor Koller's article challenges the conventional wisdom and instead points out several issues that should be considered if a law school relies on the first-year legal writing course as a component of, or in lieu of, an academic support program. First, Professor Koller argues that identifying students who may need academic support through a first-year legal writing course can give many "false positives" and "false negatives" due to the unique nature of the course. Second, Professor Koller points out that first-year legal writing courses do not provide "built-in" academic support, as is frequently assumed. Because the goals and challenges of the first-year course are so significant, there is often little opportunity for a professor to provide meaningful academic support. Finally, Professor Koller argues that the structure of the typical first-year legal writing course can encourage student dependence on faculty support, something that is counter-productive to a law school's academic support efforts. In light of these issues that are presented in the first-year, Professor Koller argues that the best use of a legal writing course in conjunction with academic support is as a vehicle for more advanced academic support in the upper-level curriculum. Professor Koller supports this argument with an illustration of the academic support model in place at the University of Maryland School of Law.
Equilibria of dynamic games with many players: Existence, approximation, and market structure

In this paper we study stochastic dynamic games with many players; these are a fundamental model for a wide range of economic applications. The standard solution concept for such games is Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE), but it is well known that MPE computation becomes intractable as the number of players increases. We instead consider the notion of stationary equilibrium (SE), where players optimize assuming the empirical distribution of others' states remains constant at its long run average. We make two main contributions. First, we provide a rigorous justification for using SE. In particular, we provide a parsimonious collection of exogenous conditions over model primitives that guarantee existence of SE, and ensure that an appropriate approximation property to MPE holds, in a general model with possibly unbounded state spaces. Second, we draw a significant connection between the validity of SE, and market structure: under the same conditions that imply SE exist and approximates MPE well, the market becomes fragmented in the limit of many firms. To illustrate this connection, we study in detail a series of dynamic oligopoly examples. These examples show that our conditions enforce a form of “decreasing returns to larger states;” this yields fragmented industries in the SE limit. By contrast, violation of these conditions suggests “increasing returns to larger states” and potential market concentration. In that sense, our work uses a fully dynamic framework to also contribute to a longstanding issue in industrial organization: understanding the determinants of market structure in different industries.
Benefit-Cost Analysis of Environmental Projects: A Plethora of Biases Understating Net Benefits

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores sources of bias in the methods used to evaluate environmental policy in the United States, although most of the arguments translate immediately to decision-making in other countries. There are some “big picture” considerations that have gone unrecognized, and there are numerous more minor, yet cumulatively important, technical details that point to potentially large biases against acceptance on benefit-cost grounds of environmental policies that have true marginal benefits greater than true marginal costs, both in net present value terms. It is hoped that the issues raised here will improve future conduct of benefit-cost analyses of environmental policies.
Gain and loss learning differentially contribute to life financial outcomes.

Emerging findings imply that distinct neurobehavioral systems process gains and losses. This study investigated whether individual differences in gain learning and loss learning might contribute to different life financial outcomes (i.e., assets versus debt). In a community sample of healthy adults (n=75), rapid learners had smaller debt-to-asset ratios overall. More specific analyses, however, revealed that those who learned rapidly about gains had more assets, while those who learned rapidly about losses had less debt. These distinct associations remained strong even after controlling for potential cognitive (e.g., intelligence, memory, and risk preferences) and socioeconomic (e.g., age, sex, ethnicity, income, education) confounds. Self-reported measuresofassetsanddebtwereadditionallyvalidatedwithcredit reportdatainasubsetofsubjects. Thesefindingssupport the notion that different gain and loss learning systems may exert a cumulative influence on distinct life financial outcomes.
Stochastic differential portfolio games

We study stochastic dynamic investment games in continuous time between two investors (players) who have available two dierent, but possibly correlated, investment opportunities. that depend on the achievement of relative perfor- mance goals and/or shortfalls. We provide conditions under which a game with a general payo function has an achievable value, and give an explicit representation for the value and resulting equilibrium portfolio strategies in that case. It is shown that nonperfect correlation is required to rule out trivial solutions. We then use this general result to explicitly solve a variety of spe- cic games. For example, we solve a probability maximizing game, where each investor is trying to maximize the probability of beating the other's return by a given predetermined percentage. We also consider objectives related to the minimization or maximization of the expected time until one investor's return beats the other investor's return by a given percentage. Our results allow a new interpretation of the market price of risk in a Black-Scholes world. Games with discounting are also discussed as are games of xed duration related to utility maximization.
Insurers’ Negotiating Leverage and the External Effects of Medicare Part D

Abstract By influencing the size and bargaining power of private insurers, public subsidization of private health insurance may project effects beyond the subsidized population. We test for such spillovers by analyzing how increases in insurer size resulting from the implementation of Medicare Part D affected drug prices negotiated in the non-Medicare commercial market. On average, Part D lowered prices for commercial enrollees by 3.7 percentage. The external commercial market savings amount to $1.5 billion per year, which, if passed to consumers, approximates the internal cost savings of newly insured subsidized beneficiaries. If retained by insurers, it corresponds to a greater than 9.25 percentage average increase in profitability on stand-alone drug insurance.
The Welfare Effects of Metering Ties

Critics of current tying doctrine argue that metering ties can increase consumer welfare and total welfare without increasing output and that they generally increase both welfare measures. Contrary to those claims, we prove that metering ties always lower both consumer welfare and total welfare unless they increase capital good output. We further show that under market conditions we argue are realistic (which include a lognormal distribution of usage rates that are independently distributed from per-usage valuations), metering ties always harm consumer welfare, even when output increases. Whether metering ties raise or lower total welfare depends on the dispersion of desired usage, the cost structure, and the dissipation of profits caused by metering. For realistic cost values, metering ties will reduce total welfare if the dispersion in desired usage of the metered good is below 0.62. (For comparison, 0.74 is the dispersion of income in the United States.) If 5% of metering profits are dissipated, metering will reduce total welfare for all cost levels unless the dispersion in desired usage exceeds 150% of the dispersion of income in the United States (JEL Codes: C72, K21, L12, L40, L41, L42)
Reporting Discretion and the Choice of Fresh Start Values in Companies Emerging from Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

Using a sample of seventy-two firms that adopted fresh start reporting upon their emergence from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, I test whether management estimates of fresh start equity values are misstated and whether such misstatements are related to characteristics of individual firms' bankruptcy process. I predict that the reported fresh start value reflects a tension between managerial incentives to promote the acceptance of the plan of reorganization, and incentives to enhance future reported performance. I test whether the tendency to overstate the fresh start equity value is increasing in factors affecting the acceptance of the reorganization plan (i.e., bankruptcy claimants' relative bargaining power) and decreasing in factors affecting postbankruptcy reported performance (i.e., the probability of future losses). I find that, relative to the market value of equity immediately after emergence from Chapter 11, the fresh start equity value is, on average, understated by about 4%. The difference between the fresh start equity value and market value also exhibits significant cross-sectional variation (an average absolute error of 11%). Consistent with my first prediction, the misstatement is increasing in the relative bargaining power of junior claimants. In contrast to my second prediction, the misstatement is also increasing in the likelihood of future reported losses. This result suggests that firms that are more likely to experience postbankruptcy financial distress are more concerned with obtaining acceptance for their plan than with the effects of the fresh start equity value on postbankruptcy performance. Finally, I document that the misstatement in the fresh start equity value is negatively related to whether firms have undergone prepackaged bankruptcies, and positively related to replacement of a prebankruptcy CEO.
The Plasticity of Harm in the Service of Criminalization Goals

The “harm principle,” which suggests that the State should criminalize conduct only if doing so is necessary to prevent harm to others, has long been at the center of debates about the legal enforcement of morality through the law. This Essay presents a series of original experiments that investigate the psychological “plasticity” of harm in the context of criminalization—i.e., the extent to which people may recruit harm to achieve desired outcomes within the terms of a given legal constraint. In the first study, we identified various scenarios that induced defiance of the harm principle, such that the participants wanted to criminalize the conduct even if they did not think that it caused harm to others. We then used these scenarios in a second study to investigate how people would respond when they were told that the law requires a finding of harm in order to impose a criminal penalty. As predicted, the respondents who were presented with the necessity-of-harm constraint continued to criminalize at the same rate, but they imputed harm to the conduct where harm was not previously reported. The third study demonstrated the directionality and universality of the harm plasticity effect by showing that a legally extrinsic ideological factor exacerbated the recruiting of harm among people on both sides of a
Fixed-prize tournaments versus first-price auctions in innovation contests

This paper analyzes a procurement setting with identical firms and stochastic innovations. In contrast to the previous literature, I show that a procurer who cannot charge entry fees may prefer a fixed-prize tournament to a first-price auction. The reason is that holding an auction may leave higher rents to firms when the innovation technology is subject to large random factors.
Symposium Introduction:The New Normal in College Sports:Realigned and Reckoning

On Friday, April 5, 2013, Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California convened the Pepperdine Law Review Symposium on The New Normal in College Sports: Realigned and Reckoning. Highlights included a conversation with institutional leaders of major intercollegiate athletic programs; a consideration of the possibility of an antitrust exemption for the NCAA; the impact of conference realignment, digital media, broadcasting, and commercialization; and other emerging hot topics in college sports.
The Global Rise of the Value-Weighted Portfolio

We first develop a theory-based metric to judge the popularity of value weighting in a stock market. We then use our metric to document that although value weighting is less popular in emerging markets than in developed markets, its popularity is increasing almost everywhere. Finally, as we have better data for the United States, we explore why value weighting is becoming more popular in the United States.