cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Go‐Shop Provisions in Merger Agreements

We examine whether go-shop provisions in merger agreements are used to benefit target shareholders or for agency/entrenchment reasons. We find that go-shop provisions are more likely in deals involving the negotiation selling method, financial buyers and all cash financing, and in targets with less valuation uncertainty. We confirm that go-shops have a positive association with the initial offer premium. Results suggest that deals with go-shop provisions are more likely to have a competing bid and an upward revision of the initial offer premium. Collectively, our results indicate that go-shops are effective contractual devices used to further target shareholder interests.
The new "contractarian" paradigm in environmental regulation

In response to criticism of the traditional command-and-control approach to environmental regulation, state and federal regulators have created a “contractarian” approach. More specifically, contractarian environmental regulation consists of an arrangement in which regulators agree not to enforce various laws applicable to regulated entities in exchange for the entities’ agreements to fulfill additional obligations not required by existing law. In this article, Professor Dana argues that the contractarian approach stems from two factors: political disagreements that make the amendment of existing environmental laws difficult and the complexity of environmental problems, which makes a decentralized approach to regulation desirable. He then discusses four recent regulatory reform initiatives that both illustrate how contractarian regulation works and explicate the difference between it and command-and-control regulation. Professor Dana argues that the contractarian approach, as compared to its command-and-control counterpart, has potential costs as well: decreased participation in the regulatory process by environmental advocacy groups and stasis in the overall regulatory system. Finally, Professor Dana contends that Congress must address any shortcomings of the contractarian approach and strike a balance between the approach’s enhancement of localized environmental regulation, on the one hand, and its potential to cause regulatory entrenchment and decreased public participation, on the other.
World Food Prices and Monetary Policy

Abstract How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks. This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports. We characterize implications for dynamics, optimal monetary policy, and the relative performance of practical monetary rules. While CPI targeting and expected CPI targeting can dominate PPI targeting if international risk sharing is perfect, even seemingly mild departures from the latter make PPI targeting a winner.
Situating the academic study of controlling state crime

This article reviews the academic context of state crime, focuses on its control, posits a number of areas where control can have a series of unintended consequences, and then suggests how to improve the publics ability to control state crime.
Health Insurance, Treatment and Outcomes: Using Auto Accidents as Health Shocks

FFORTS to reform the $1.3-trillion U.S. healthcare industry are often motivated by a concern that the uninsured are denied access to healthcare (NCHS, 2002). Indeed, the uninsured are less likely to pay for care, and theory suggests that they would receive less treatment. Previous empirical work supports this conclusion and finds that the uninsured receive approximately 40% less healthcare than the insured. Though treatment differences have been labeled the “access gap,” they can be difficult to interpret. First, health outcomes are rarely compared. Without knowing the effect on health, treatment differences may imply that the insured receive too much care, rather than the uninsured receiving too little. For example, moral hazard problems may allow physicians to practice flat-of-the-curve medicine, where diminishing returns to medical care imply small health gains with additional treatment (Enthoven, 1980). Though the insured may receive more care, this may not translate into health differences. Further, there may be selection problems. Individuals decide to purchase insurance, and they decide to seek medical care. If those with a low risk of using medical care are also less likely to purchase insurance, then treatment differences may have little to do with access to care. This positive correlation between risk level and insurance coverage is a standard result in contract theory and suggests that information problems in insurance markets may lead to treatment differences. The measurement of these differences is further complicated by the lack of an adequate comparison group to test whether unobserved differences between the insured and uninsured drive the difference in care received. To examine health outcomes and consider selection problems, this paper focuses on an unexpected health shock— severe automobile accidents where incapacitated crash victims have little choice but to use professional medical care. Using a unique data set that links police accident reports to hospital discharge records, treatment levels and mortality rates are compared between the insured and uninsured. These data provide a rich description of each accident and offer a new way to investigate whether the uninsured are denied access to life-saving healthcare. One innovation in the paper is the use of a comparison group that is similar to the uninsured in observed risk-taking behavior, income, vehicle, and injury characteristics: drivers who have health insurance but do not have automobile insurance.
Is economic analysis of projects still useful

The author argues for a shift in the focus of economic analysis of projects. First, project analysts need to make full use of project information, especially identifying the source of the divergence between market prices and economic costs as well as the source of the divergence between economic and private flows, and the group that pays the cost or enjoys the benefits. This information identifies gainers, and losers, likely project supporters and detractors, and fiscal impact. Second, project analysts need to look at the project from the perspective of the main stakeholders, principally the implementing agency, the government, and the country. Third, they should also assess whether all of the main actors have the economic and financial incentives to implement the project as designed. Fourth, they should take advantage of advances in technology and attempt to identify and measure any external effects of projects, as well as the benefits of education and health projects. Finally, they should take advantage of the advances in personal computing to provide a more systematic assessment of risk.
The Case for International Antitrust

Competition policy is made at the national level but a great deal of the business activity that it seeks to regulate takes place at the international level. Though it is universally accepted that some level of international cooperation is necessary to make regulation effective under these conditions, there is a considerable diversity of views on the question of how much cooperation is appropriate. The presence of international activity distorts competition policy in at least two ways. First, it causes the preferred domestic policies of states to diverge from what they would be in the absence of such activity. States that are net exporters of goods sold in imperfectly competitive markets have an incentive to weaken their antitrust rules and states that are net importers of such goods have reason to tighten theirs. Second, the choice of law rules adopted to establish the jurisdictional reach of domestic law create an additional divergence between the substantive laws actually chosen and those that would be chosen by a closed economy. States that choose to limit their laws to activities that take place within their territory are better off if they also weaken their substantive laws. States that extend the reach of their laws generate overlapping jurisdiction and force firms to run a gauntlet of legal rules that includes the strictest elements of each state’s laws, leading to a de facto regulatory standard that is stricter than that of any single state. This chapter explains why these problems cannot be resolved through the sort of low levels of cooperation that dominate current international antitrust efforts. Information sharing in particular cannot address the distortions to competition policy generated by cross-border business. Choice of law strategies can improve the regulatory framework, but can only partially address the problem and even this would require a dramatic change to existing policies. What is required, then, is a deeper form of cooperation on the subject of substantive laws or international standards. Though cooperation of this sort is difficult to achieve, there is no other way to address the policy distortions created when national authorities try to regulate international competition.
Political risk and international valuation

Measuring the impact of political risk on investment projects is one of the most vexing issues in international business. One popular approach is to assume that the sovereign yield spread captures political risk and to augment the project discount rate by this spread. We show that this approach is flawed. While the sovereign spread is influenced by political risk, it also reflects other risks that are likely included in the valuation analysis — leading to the double counting of risks. We propose to use “political risk spreads” to undo the double counting in the evaluation of international investment projects.
Do Corporate Social Responsibility Engagements Lead to Real Environmental, Social, and Governance Impact?

We construct an event-based outcome measure of firm-level environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impact for public and private firms globally from 2007 to 2015 using data from RepRisk. Then we...
The timing of movie releases: Evidence from the home video industry☆

Abstract In the movie industry, an intriguing question is why studios cluster their big theatrical hits during the Memorial Day or July 4th weekends in the early summer as opposed to the fall. This paper examines the home video industry to provide more evidence on whether booms in theatrical revenues are driven by the underlying seasonality of demand or the quality of movies released. First, I find no evidence of segmentation within the home video market by genre or newness of videos. Secondly, my estimates of the seasonality within the home video market suggest that Memorial Day and July 4th may be more favorable for a theatrical release than Labor Day.
Using Counter‐Explanation to Limit Analysts' Forecast Optimism

Prior research demonstrates that forecast optimism is, in part, a consequence of analysts' cognitive reactions to the scenarios managers use to communicate future plans. In two experiments, we examine whether counter‐explanation (explaining why managers' plans could fail) reduces scenario‐induced optimism. We find that when compared to analysts not asked to generate counter‐explanations, analysts who complete the relatively easy task of generating few counter‐explanations make less optimistic forecasts, but analysts who complete the relatively difficult task of generating many counter‐explanations do not. Results demonstrate the usefulness of a cognitive, theory‐based mechanism for reducing forecast optimism and suggest a boundary condition for the use of that mechanism.
The marked Brauer category

We introduce the marked Brauer algebra and the marked Brauer category. These generalize the analogous constructions for the ordinary Brauer algebra to the setting of a homogeneous bilinear form on a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-graded vector space. We classify the simple modules of the marked Brauer algebra over any field of characteristic not two. Under suitable assumptions we show that the marked Brauer algebra is in Schur-Weyl duality with the Lie superalgebra, $\mathfrak{g}$, of linear maps which leave the bilinear form invariant. We also provide a classification of the indecomposable summands of the tensor powers of the natural representation for $\mathfrak{g}$ under those same assumptions. In particular, our results generalize Moon's work on the Lie superalgebra of type $\mathfrak{p}(n)$ and provide a unifying conceptual explanation for his results.
Living and Working in the City The Effect of Central City Residence on African American Self-Employment

The economic and social decline of American central cities has been well documented, especially as these cities become increasingly socially and economically isolated entities. The flight of industrial jobs from inner cities to suburban areas resulted in increasing poverty and increasing unemployment for inner-city residents. This decline has profoundly affected African Americans who are disproportionately represented among the urban poor. While central cities have been declining, American entrepreneurship has generally been increasing, with a 20% increase between 1992 and 1997. This article examines whether central city residence contributes to or detracts from self-employment. The research question is: What is the effect of central city residence on the likelihood of self-employment for African Americans and Whites?
N problems require N instruments

Abstract Eric Posner (2003) has argued that (contract) law and economics has failed to produce clear policy recommendations because its theoretical results are usually inconclusive and empirical data on the parameters are usually unavailable. Legislators and courts, however, cannot wait to make decisions until scholarship is conclusive; hence the question arises which policy conclusions are the ‘least irrational’ under those circumstances. I argue that, when scholarship is inconclusive, one principle that should guide legislators and courts is that the number of instruments should equal the number of problems. Using a single instrument for two or more problems leads to ineffectiveness (especially if the relative social importance of the problems is unequal) and indeterminacy (because setting the compromise optimally requires empirical information on the relative social importance of the problems, which is hard to acquire). I therefore argue that legislators and courts should only deviate from this principle when they have serious indications that the underlying problems are nearly completely nonverifiable and in addition roughly equal in terms of social importance. I show that when these guidelines are applied, the theoretical indeterminacy surrounding optimal remedies for contract breach – the poster child of indeterminacy – largely disappears.
Bayes Wars Redivivus - An Exchange

An electronic exchange among 10 evidence scholars that began with a discussion of the restyled Federal Rules and grew into a significant restatement of debates in evidentiary scholarship over the last 50 years, touching on relevance, probative value, inference, Bayesianism and the foundations of evidence, with an introduction by Michael Risinger.
Wheir’s the Beef?: Buffalo Law and Taxation

The intersection of buffalo law and taxation hasn't been a busy one, but accidents still happen: not everyone understands that buffalo have the right of way. This article critically analyzes the recent Tax Court summary opinion in Wheir v. Commissioner, which involved a bodybuilder who sought to deduct the cost of an incredible amount of buffalo meat. Along the way, the article brings buffalo law learning up-to-date; revisits some classic, nineteenth-century buffalo law cases; and, most important, considers whether there are important differences between the American bison and American beef cattle - differences that might have relevance to American tax law. (Hint: of course there are.)
Policy options for state pension systems and their impact on plan liabilities

We calculate the present value of state pension liabilities under existing policies and separately under policy changes that would affect pension payouts. If promised payments are viewed as default free, then it is appropriate to use discount rates given by the Treasury yield curve. If plans are frozen at June 2009 levels, then the present value of liabilities would be $1.5 trillion more than plan assets. This suggests that taxpayers will bear the lion's share of the costs associated with the legacy liabilities of state DB pension plans.
The Prevalence and Effects of Occupational Licensing

Our study provides the first national analysis of the labour market implications of workers who are licensed by any agency of the government in the USA. Using a specially designed Gallup survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans, we provide an analysis of the influence of this form of occupational regulation. We find that 29 per cent of the workforce is required to hold a licence, which is a higher percentage than that found in other studies that rely on state-level occupational licensing data or single states. Workers who have higher levels of education are more likely to work in jobs that require a licence. Union workers and government employees are more likely to have a licence requirement than are non-union or private sector employees. Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions — that is about 15 per cent — and that being both licensed and in a union can increase wages by more than 24 per cent. However, unlike unions which reduce variance in wages, licensing does not significantly reduce wage dispersion for individuals in licensed jobs.
Madonnas and Whores in the Workplace

Much has been written about “lookism” – the preferential treatment given to those who conform to societal standards of beauty. But in a recent case before the Iowa Supreme Court, a gender discrimination plaintiff alleged a sort of “reverse-lookism,” claiming that her male employer terminated her long-term employment because the employee was too physically attractive, thus tempting the employer to think about entering into an extramarital affair. To the great surprise of many who followed this case, the Iowa Supreme Court sided with the employer, declining to find him liable for gender discrimination. As one might expect, uproar ensued, with the media, the public, and the academic community eviscerating the court for its failure to recognize and rectify gender discrimination. In story after story, reporters, academics and pundits framed this decision as one involving an “irresistible woman” and a man’s “uncontrollable lust.” Yet while such characterizations made for catchy headlines, they were not quite true: The court’s decision did not hinge upon outmoded stereotypes regarding gender roles, but rather contained a plausible factual and legal basis for denying the plaintiff’s claim. This article picks up where the Iowa Supreme Court left off, exploring the complicated reasons behind this employee’s failure to win her case, and suggesting alternate theories under which a similarly-situated employee successfully could challenge this type of termination. The article also probes the reasons behind the vehement (and often misinformed) public reaction to this case. It explores the ways in which the media systematically misrepresents women, particularly in the context of suits involving workplace gender discrimination, and examines the consequences of these errors, arguing that attempts to force women in the public eye into one of two molds – either pure and pristine with muted sexuality, or sexually promiscuous and vilified – has dramatic consequences for other employees in the workplace, for policymakers, and for the public at large. INTRODUCTION 3 I. “Too Hot for the Workplace”: Nelson and Her Counterparts 4 A. Nelson v. Knight: Fired for Being “Too Hot” for Her Job? 5 B. Other Employees Who Have Claimed to be “Too Hot” for their Jobs......10 II. Another Path? How Nelson and Other “Attractive Employees” Might Prevail in Similar Cases 13 A. The Missing Harassment Claim as One Possible Route to Future Success 13 B. The Attractive Employee as a Victim of Gender Stereotyping: Applying Price Waterhouse to the “Too Hot” Employee 15 III. The Role of the Media in Misrepresenting These Cases: The Quest to Maintain the “Madonna-Whore” Paradigm 20 A. Snapshot of a Hyperbolic Media 20 B. Sexiness Sells: The Media’s Sensationalism Bias 25 C. Bias on Steroids: The Need for a Script in Stories Involving Women......26 D. A Perfect Storm: Media Sensationalism + Gender Stereotyping Leads to Skewed Reporting in Gender Discrimination Cases 31 IV. High Stakes Errors: The Ramifications of Media Bias in Stories Involving Workplace Gender Discrimination 33 CONCLUSION 36
Governments, Privatization, and Privatization: ICANN and the GAC

This paper examines the changing relationship between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and national governments. ICANN was born out of a self-contradictory attempt to “privatize” domain name governance; its relationship with national governments has been fraught ever since. Notwithstanding that national governments, over the past five years, have been increasingly well-organized and involved in ICANN processes, ICANN’s relationship with them today is incoherent, ill-functioning, and unstable. The paper tries to explain why. It roots the problem in an institutional structure carried over from ICANN’s formation, when it was thought that (non-U.S.) world governments should play a role only at the final stages of the privatized regulatory process.
Firm size, rivalry and the extent of the market in endogenous technological change

Abstract Evidence shows that firms build their market position by accumulating knowledge protected by secrecy, patents and other appropriation devices. I explore the implications of this fact in a model economy where oligopolistic firms establish in-house R&D programs. In symmetric equilibrium, the number of firms determines concentration and firm size. These determine the scale and the efficiency of R&D operations and the rate of innovation. The number of firms, moreover, is endogenous and determined jointly with the rate of growth by the zero-profit condition. This property yields new results. For example, the scale effect of population size may be negative. The market allocation of resources is not Pareto optimal. I discuss the nature of this distortion.
On the Nature of Norms: Biology, Morality, and the Disruption of Order

For a long time and through the now-quaint division of disciplines morals and norms have been set apart from other behaviorbiasing phenomena. They have also been set apart from each other. Morals are generally ceded in full to philosophers. Norms have been ceded to sociologists. In retrospect, it is not clear why this should be so. Reality is notoriously impervious to taxonomy, and the axis supposedly distinguishing morals from other norms is, after all, arbitrary. Moreover, behavior-biasing phenomena interact in important ways, making the study of parts without more just the study of parts. But one thing is clear. To the extent that understanding morals and norms is important to law, studying the two apart from other behavior-biasing phenomena creates a problem. This problem arises because of opportunity costs. Whenever a topic such as morality is both relevant to law and without a uniquely legal theoretical foundation, legal thinkers must rely (at least initially) on disciplines claiming expertise. But in a world in which the academy has divided reality into disciplinary slices which, having once been sundered, are neither differently divisible nor easily recombined there is an ever-present risk to law of disciplinary capture. As, for example, when legal thinkers may too hastily elevate the pro-
Learning by Doing and the Dynamic Effects of International Trade

Using an endogenous growth model in which learning by doing, although bounded in each good, exhibits spillovers across goods, this paper investigates the dynamic effects of international trade. Examining the interaction of a LDC and a DC, the latter distinguished by a higher initial level of knowledge, the author finds that, under free trade, the LDC (DC) experiences rates of technical progress and GDP growth less than or equal (greater than or equal to) those enjoyed under autarky. Since both countries enjoy the usual static gains from trade, free trade may, nevertheless, improve the welfare of LDC consumers.
Privacy and the USA patriot act: Rights, the value of rights, and autonomy

Civil liberty and privacy advocates have criticized the USA PATRIOT Act ("Act") on numerous grounds since it was passed in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Two of the primary targets of those criticisms are the Act's "sneak-and-peek" search provision, which allows law enforcement agents to conduct searches without informing the search's subjects, and the business records provision, which allows agents to secretly subpoena a variety of information - most notoriously, library borrowing records. Without attending to all of the ways that critics claim the Act burdens privacy, I examine whether those two controversial parts of the Act, the section 213 "sneak-and-peak" search and the section 215 business records "gag-rule" provisions, burden privacy as critics charge. I begin by describing the two provisions. Next, I explain why those provisions don't burden privacy on standard philosophical accounts. Moreover, I argue that they need not conflict with the justifications for people's claims to privacy, nor do they undermine the value of privacy on the standard accounts. However, rather than simply concluding that the sections don't burden privacy, I argue that those provisions are problematic on the grounds that they undermine the value of whatever rights to privacy people have. Specifically, I argue that it is important to distinguish rights themselves from the value that those rights have to the rights-holders, and that an essential element of privacy rights having value is that privacy right-holders be able to tell the extent to which they actually have privacy. This element, which is justified by the right-holders' autonomy interests, is harmed by the two provisions.
Is There a Quid Pro Quo between Hedge Funds and Sell-Side Equity Analysts?

In this article, the authors posit a quid pro quo in economic benefits between sell-side equity analysts and large hedge fund managers. They show that large hedge funds opportunistically trade one to four days prior to the publication of a recommendation change, a finding consistent with flow of information from analysts to hedge funds. Next, the authors demonstrate that in return for the information provided, analysts benefit from (1) better external evaluations and (2) higher trading commissions and fees for their brokerage firm. Notably, pre-trading occurs only when the analyst issuing the recommendations has a high external evaluation and the analyst’s brokerage house is a prime broker to the hedge fund. TOPICS:Manager selection, fundamental equity analysis, portfolio construction
Medical Malpractice and the Insurance Underwriting Cycle

The insurance underwriting cycle has become a touchstone in the debate over medical malpractice reform. On the one hand, trial lawyers and others who seek to preserve existing medical malpractice liability rules commonly report that the high-priced, “hard market” phase of the liability insurance underwriting cycle, and not real developments in malpractice litigation, fueled the medical malpractice insurance crises of the mid-1970s, mid-1980s, and early 2000s.2 On the other hand, medical associations and others who seek further restrictive tort reforms claim that those crises represented the long overdue consequences of escalating tort costs that the competitive, “soft market” phase of the insurance underwriting cycle had allowed people to wish away.3 Each side accuses the other of using the insurance under-
The negative trade-off between risk and incentives: Evidence from the american whaling industry

Abstract This paper analyzes the trade-off between risk and incentives in the share contracts of the American whaling industry. Using a newly collected panel of 5378 individuals who sailed on more than 1000 whaling voyages from 1855–68, the response of sailors’ compensation to an increase in risk is estimated. The risks used to identify this response resulted from the commerce-raiding naval vessels of the Confederacy during the Civil War. As the Confederate cruisers sailed primarily in the Atlantic, and therefore posed far less of a threat to whaling voyages to other oceans, a quasi-experimental approach focusing on the differences between Atlantic voyages compared to others is implemented. The results are consistent with a negative trade-off between risk and incentives in the industry’s contracts. Moreover, evidence is found of selection among less risk-averse sailors and merchants into riskier voyages during the war.
Patent Ships Sail an Antitrust Sea

This brief essay arises from my participation in an April 2006 conference at Seattle University Law School, entitled At the Intersection of Antitrust and Intellectual Property Law: Looking Both Ways to Avoid a Collision. This intersection metaphor is a common one for describing antitrust law's relationship with intellectual property law, among both courts and commentators. This essay explores a different metaphor: patent ships sail an antitrust sea, protecting those aboard from competition's harshest dangers - but only for a time. The nautical metaphor evokes three ideas that the crossroads metaphor does not. First, vigorous competition is the pervasive, baseline reality; patent protection is the temporary, partial exception. Second, we grasp both patent and antitrust policy with a common science, economics. Third, although neither patent nor antitrust law doctrines are good tools for fixing fundamental problems in the other body of law, both these bodies of law help us better understand the shortcomings of the other.
Contact High: The External Effects of Retail Marijuana Establishments on House Prices

Using publicly available data from the city of Denver and the state of Colorado, this study examines the effects of retail conversions (conversions from medical marijuana to retail marijuana stores) on neighboring house values in Denver, CO. The study period reflects a time before and after retail marijuana sales became legal in Colorado in 2014. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we compare houses that were in close proximity to a conversion (within 0.1 miles) to those that are farther away from a conversion. We find that single‐family residences close to a retail conversion increased in value by approximately 8% relative to houses that are located slightly farther away. We perform a battery of robustness checks and falsification tests to provide additional support for this finding. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine at a microlevel the highly localized effect of retail marijuana establishments on house prices and hope that it can contribute to the debate on retail marijuana laws.
Impact of social network structure on content propagation: A study using YouTube data

We study how the size and structure of the local network around a node affects the aggregate diffusion of products seeded by it. We examine this in the context of YouTube, the popular video-sharing site. We address the endogeneity problems common to this setting by using a rich dataset and a careful estimation methodology. We empirically demonstrate that the size and structure of an author’s local network is a significant driver of the popularity of videos seeded by her, even after controlling for observed and unobserved video characteristics, unobserved author characteristics, and endogenous network formation. Our findings are distinct from those in the peer effects literature, which examines neighborhood effects on individual behavior, since we document the causal relationship between a node’s local network position and the global diffusion of products seeded by it. Our results provide guidelines for identifying seeds that provide the best return on investment, thereby aiding managers conducting buzz marketing campaigns on social media forums. Further, our study sheds light on the other substantive factors that affect video consumption on YouTube.
Toward Procedural Optionality: Private Ordering of Public Adjudication

Private resolution and public adjudication of disputes are commonly seen as discrete, antipodal processes. The essence of private dispute resolution is that the parties can arrange the disputed rights and entitlements per agreement and without judicial intervention. In public adjudication, however, the sovereign mandates the substantive and procedural laws to be applied, many of which cannot be changed by either a party’s unilateral decision or both parties’ mutual consent. Neither approach allows a party an option to unilaterally alter important aspects of the process, such as the attorney fee rules and standards of proof. This understanding is commonly accepted and rarely challenged, but it is curious nonetheless. This Article proposes that we move toward procedural optionality, the idea that each party should have options to choose certain procedural laws in public adjudication. To show the potential efficacy of this concept, this Article proposes a scheme in which parties can unilaterally shift fees as long as they contractually bond their good faith by assuming a higher standard of proof. Allowing private choice to alter these rules can better address the problems of frivolous suits and nonprosecution of low value claims—two problematic bookends in the spectrum of litigation. By properly structuring party options, the law can create greater convergence of private incentives and social interest. More efficient dispute resolution results, as measured by increased enforcement of and compliance with the substantive laws, at lower cost. Lastly, this Article concludes by examining more broadly some policy implications of procedural optionality for substantive and procedural laws.
Constitutional Issues Involving the Controversy Over American Membership in the League of Nations, 1918–1920

Constitutional issues were an integral part of the controversy over U.S. membership in the League of Nations. Opponents of membership contended that the League would diminish national sovereignty, violate principles of federalism, and interfere with the separation of powers between the president and Congress. In particular, opponents warned that the League would impair congressional and presidential war powers, restrict federal authority over many domestic issues – particularly labor regulations, tariffs, and immigration – and limit the police powers of the states. Proponents of the League contended that constitutional objections were no more than a pretext for political opposition and that Congress, the president, and the U.S. Supreme Court would never interpret the League’s covenant in a manner that brought it into conflict with the Constitution. This article examines these constitutional issues and considers the extent to which they contributed to the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the League. The article concludes that “irreconcilable” foes of the League were motivated mostly by political objections, but that the so-called “reservationists” raised serious constitutional questions that could have been resolved in favor of membership in League if President Wilson had been willing to compromise with the reservationists.
Optimal learning before choice

Abstract A Bayesian decision maker is choosing among two alternatives with uncertain payoffs and an outside option with known payoff. Before deciding which alternative to adopt, the decision maker can purchase sequentially multiple informative signals on each of the two alternatives. To maximize the expected payoff, the decision maker solves the problem of optimal dynamic allocation of learning efforts as well as optimal stopping of the learning process. We show that the decision maker considers an alternative for learning or adoption if and only if the expected payoff of the alternative is above a threshold. Given both alternatives in the decision maker's consideration set, we find that if the outside option is weak and the decision maker's beliefs about both alternatives are relatively low, it is optimal for the decision maker to learn information from the alternative that has a lower expected payoff and less uncertainty, given all other characteristics of the two alternatives being the same. If the decision maker subsequently receives enough positive informative signals, the decision maker will switch to learning the better alternative; otherwise the decision maker will rule out this alternative from consideration and adopt the currently more preferred alternative. We find that this strategy works because it minimizes the decision maker's learning efforts. We also characterize the optimal learning policy when the outside option is relatively high, and discuss several extensions.
Strategic Disclosure: The Case of Business School Rankings

Abstract We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas mid-ranked schools are most likely to disclose. Second, schools that do poorly in the U.S. News rankings are more likely to disclose their Princeton Review certification, suggesting that schools treat different certifications as substitutes. Third, conditional on displaying a ranking, the majority of schools coarsen information to make it seem more favorable. The stark patterns in the data help to provide empirical evidence on the strategic elements of voluntary disclosure and marketing decisions.
Relational Contracts in the Privatization of Social Welfare: The Case of Housing

Privatization has become a permanent and increasingly significant fixture on the landscape of contemporary public policy. Federal, state, and local governments now turn to the private sector for everything from collecting neighborhood garbage to assisting in the occupation of Iraq. As Martha Minow recently noted, “a sea change is at work,” with “[p]rivate and market-style mechanisms . . . increasingly employed to provide what government had taken as duties.” Nowhere is this trend more pronounced, and contested, than in the privatization of social welfare. In that arena, privatization’s potential to harness the experience, efficiency, and diversity of the private sector sharply clashes with the risk to accountability raised by private-sector provision of public services. Commentators concerned with capturing privatization’s benefits and muting its potential harms often call for additional government control of private providers through their contractual agreements, specifying in ever-morecareful terms the scope of the engagement and monitoring providers with evergreater oversight. In this view, privatization is best approached through contracts that are “clear, thorough, accurate, and unambiguous.” These prescriptions reflect an adversarial model of privatization analogous to classical discrete contracting in private law. The model presumes that the parties to the agreement are one-time players, bargaining outside the larger legal and social context in which their interaction occurs, and capable of capturing the key variables of their engagement in relatively complete terms. Conceptualizing privatization through this discrete-contracting lens, however, understates the fundamentally relational nature of many of the
Foreword--King v. Burwell Symposium: Comments on the Commentaries (and on Some Elephants in the Room)

When the Editors of the Pepperdine Law Review asked me to pen a response commentary to the essays submitted for their symposium on the King v. Burwell case, I agreed only with some reluctance. As some readers of this symposium volume may already be aware, I took an academic leave during the time period extending from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2012 to accept a position at the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy. The portfolio of my Treasury position included the Regulations for Internal Revenue Code § 36B (Section 36B)—the Regulations that were being challenged in the King v. Burwell1 case. I must thus clarify at the outset that nothing I write in this response commentary should be taken as indicative of the views of the Treasury Department, the Obama Administration, or anyone other than myself. The thrust of my response commentary will be to praise the submitted essays for their excellence and insightfulness, but to suggest that the submitted essays nonetheless might benefit from focusing more on the role of the political mobilization that resulted in the King v. Burwell dispute. The essays submitted for this symposium volume largely concentrate on the implications of the King v. Burwell decision for the future of Chevron deference, both in tax and non-tax contexts. Accordingly, Professor Johnson’s essay argues that Chevron deference “is now receding in tax” and that, more generally, we are now seeing the Chevron doctrine’s “fall in tax and elsewhere; a fall in substantive significance, although perhaps not frequency of citation.” Professor Johnson argues persuasively, yet some of the other submitted essays express greater uncertainty about the implications of the King v. Burwell decision for the future of Chevron deference. For instance,
The Knowledge Police

The theft of U.S. trade secrets and intellectual property (“IP”) has reached such critical proportions that President Barack Obama personally called China’s new president, Xi Jinpin, to ask him to take serious steps to investigate and halt any IP thefts against U.S. companies that originate from China. Other senior Washington officials, such as National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Army General Martin Dempsey, have voiced similar concerns. In 2008, Congress enacted the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (“PRO-IP Act”), which led to the appointment of the nation’s first “IP Czar.” While this development was greatly heralded as an important achievement in the effort to coordinate national efforts to combat IP infringement, this Article argues that the office of the IP Czar has been largely ineffective.
The five-factor model of personality traits and organizational citizenship behaviors: A meta-analysis.

Using meta-analytic tests based on 87 statistically independent samples, we investigated the relationships between the five-factor model (FFM) of personality traits and organizational citizenship behaviors in both the aggregate and specific forms, including individual-directed, organization-directed, and change-oriented citizenship. We found that Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness/Intellect have incremental validity for citizenship over and above Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, 2 well-established FFM predictors of citizenship. In addition, FFM personality traits predict citizenship over and above job satisfaction. Finally, we compared the effect sizes obtained in the current meta-analysis with the comparable effect sizes predicting task performance from previous meta-analyses. As a result, we found that Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Extraversion have similar magnitudes of relationships with citizenship and task performance, whereas Openness and Agreeableness have stronger relationships with citizenship than with task performance. This lends some support to the idea that personality traits are (slightly) more important determinants of citizenship than of task performance. We conclude with proposed directions for future research on the relationships between FFM personality traits and specific forms of citizenship, based on the current findings.
When Choosing Is Not Deciding: The Effect of Perceived Responsibility on Satisfaction

Prior research has found differences in satisfaction for choosers and nonchoosers of the same outcome. Two studies show that differentiability of the choice-set options moderates this effect. When options are more differentiated, choice enhances consumers' satisfaction with positive and dissatisfaction with negative outcomes; when options are less differentiated, choosers experience the same level of satisfaction as nonchoosers, regardless of the option valence. We test the hypothesis that the effect of outcome differentiability is due to differences in perceived responsibility and subsequent self-credit and self-blame for the decision outcome. A third study separates the effects of differentiability from random choice.
When Do Legislators Pass on Pork? The Role of Political Parties in Determining Legislator Effort

A central challenge in political economy is to identify the conditions under which legislators seek to “bring home the pork” to constituents. We conduct the first systematic analysis of one determinant of constituency service, voter attachment to political parties, holding constant electoral and political institutions. Our analysis takes advantage of data from a unique type of public spending program that is proliferating across developing countries, the constituency development fund (CDF), which offers more precise measures of legislator effort than are common in the literature. Examining the CDF in India, we find that legislator effort is significantly lower in constituencies that are party strongholds. This result, which is robust to controls for alternate explanations, implies that legislators pass on pork when voters are more attached to political parties. It has implications not only for understanding political incentives and the dynamics of party formation, but also for evaluating the impact of CDFs.
Prior Restraints and Intellectual Property: The Clash between Intellectual Property and the First Amendment from an Economic Perspective

Intellectual property is under attack. In 1999, in Ford Motor Co. v. Lane, a federal district court judge denied a preliminary injunction to prevent disclosure of a trade secret on the grounds such an injunction would be a prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment. More recently, this same argument prevailed in DVD Copy Control Assoc. v. Bunner, 113 Cal. Rptr. 2d 338 (Ca. Ct. App. 2001). (On February 20, 2002, the California Supreme Court granted the petition to review Bunner (see 2002 Cal. LEXIS 614)). The use of preliminary relief to protect intellectual property has a long history. It is especially necessary to protect volatile intellectual property such as trade secrets since such property ceases to exist once it is disclosed to the public. Such relief has typically been utilized by courts to protect trade secrets with little discussion; additionally, such relief is authorized by the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Nevertheless, a legitimate argument can be made that such preliminary relief may impinge upon First Amendment rights. Several well-known commentators have written in support of prohibiting preliminary injunctions to protect trade secrets and intellectual property generally. This article explores the interaction of the First Amendment and the need to protect intellectual property via preliminary relief. It starts with the proposition that freedom of speech and private property rights are equally important fundamental rights. It then explores the underlying policies of freedom of speech and the recognition of private property, which includes recognizing intellectual property as a form of private property. The article reaches different conclusions depending upon the type of intellectual property involved. However, it provides an argument that both Ford and Bunner, discussed above, are incorrectly decided with regard to trade secrets.