cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Drug Use and AFDC Participation: Is There a Connection?

Drug use and welfare are two serious social problems that have received widespread public attention. Recently, it has been suggested that illicit drug use is a major cause of welfare, although there is only anecdotal evidence to support such a claim. This article provides the first systematic analysis of the issue by examining the relationship between illicit drug use and welfare participation among a nationally representative sample of young adults. The results indicate that past year drug use, predominantly marijuana use, is positively related to future welfare participation for both nonblack and black women. The magnitude of the drug effect, however, is modest: If drug use among welfare participants were reduced to the levels of nonparticipants, welfare participation would decline by approximately 3 to 5 percent.
Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan

Policy debates on strategies to end extremist violence frequently cite poverty as a root cause of support for the perpetrating groups. There is little evidence to support this contention, particularly in the Pakistani case. Pakistan’s urban poor are more exposed to the negative externalities of militant violence and may in fact be less supportive of the groups. To test these hypotheses we conducted a 6,000-person, nationally representative survey of Pakistanis that measured affect toward four militant organizations. By applying a novel measurement strategy, we mitigate the item nonresponse and social desirability biases that plagued previous studies due to the sensitive nature of militancy. Contrary to expectations, poor Pakistanis dislikemilitantsmorethanmiddle-classcitizens.Thisdislikeisstrongestamongtheurbanpoor,particularlythoseinviolent districts, suggesting that exposure to terrorist attacks reduces support for militants. Long-standing arguments tying support for violent organizations to income may require substantial revision.
Origins of Stock Market Fluctuations

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the willingness to bear risk independently of macroeconomic fundamentals explain most of the variation in the market. In the long run, the market is profoundly affected by shocks that reallocate the rewards of a given level of production between workers and shareholders. Productivity shocks play a small role in historical stock market fluctuations at all horizons.
Solar Thermal Energy Conversion Enhanced by Selective Metafilm Absorber Under Multiple Solar Concentrations at High Temperatures

Concentrating solar power, particularly parabolic trough system with solar concentrations less than 50, requires spectrally selective solar absorbers that are thermally stable at high temperatures of 400°C above to achieve high efficiency. In this work, the solar-thermal performance of a selective multilayer metafilm absorber is characterized along with a black absorber for comparison by a lab-scale experimental setup that measures the steady-state absorber temperature under multiple solar concentrations. Heat transfer analysis is employed to elucidate different heat transfer modes and validate the solar-thermal experiment. Due to the superior spectral selectivity and excellent thermal stability, the metafilm absorber deposited on the cost-effective stainless steel foil could achieve the solar-thermal efficiency 57% at a steady-state temperature of 371°C under 10 suns during the lab-scale experiment with losses, while a highest efficiency of 83% was projected under the same conditions for practical solar thermal applications. The results here will facilitate the research and development of novel solar materials for high-efficiency solar thermal energy conversion.
A general model of the public goods dilemma

An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favours individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio, parasite virulence, microbial metabolism, punishment of noncooperators, and nearly all aspects of sociality have been analysed as public goods shaped by kin and group selection. Here, I develop two general aspects of the public goods problem that have received relatively little attention. First, variation in individual resources favours selfish individuals to vary their allocation to public goods. Those individuals better endowed contribute their excess resources to public benefit, whereas those individuals with fewer resources contribute less to the public good. Thus, purely selfish behaviour causes individuals to stratify into upper classes that contribute greatly to public benefit and social cohesion and to lower classes that contribute little to the public good. Second, if group success absolutely requires production of the public good, then the pressure favouring production is relatively high. By contrast, if group success depends weakly on the public good, then the pressure favouring production is relatively weak. Stated in this way, it is obvious that the role of baseline success is important. However, discussions of public goods problems sometimes fail to emphasize this point sufficiently. The models here suggest simple tests for the roles of resource variation and baseline success. Given the widespread importance of public goods, better models and tests would greatly deepen our understanding of many processes in biology and sociality.
Incorporating Employee Heterogeneity into Default Rules for Retirement Plan Selection

We study the effect of incorporating heterogeneity into default rules by examining the choice between retirement plans at a firm that transitioned from a defined benefit (DB) to a defined contribution (DC) plan. The default plan for existing employees varied discontinuously depending on their age. Employing regression discontinuity techniques, we find that the default increased the probability of enrollment in the default plan by 60 percentage points. We develop a framework to solve for the optimal default rule analytically and numerically and find that considerable welfare gains are possible if defaults vary by observable characteristics.
Symbiosis of Monetary and Fiscal Policies in a Monetary Union

We consider the interaction between the monetary policy in a monetary union, and the separate fiscal policies of the member countries. We use a Barro–Gordon-type model extended to many countries and fiscal policies. Each country’s fiscal policies inflict externalities on other countries, and the common monetary policy has its time-consistency problem. But if the two types of policymakers agree about the ideal levels of output and inflation, then this ideal is attained despite disagreements about the weights of the objectives, despite ex post monetary accommodation to fiscal profligacy, without fiscal coordination, without monetary commitment, and for any order of moves.
Opining on Death: Witness Sentence Recommendations in Capital Trials

Despite the Supreme CoUrt's command that capital prosecutions be free of undue arbitrary and capricious influences, the trials themselves are becoming increasingly emotional and personalized. This Article addresses a key outgrowth of this evolution: the increasingly common practice of witnesses opining on whether a defendant should be put to death, despite the Court's apparent prohibition of such testimony. The Article addresses why this practice is likely to continue, and advances several reasons why the Supreme Court should impose an unequivocal bar on sentence opinion, testimony in capital trials. Fish not, with this melancholy bait, For this fool gudgeon, this opinion. —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE act 1, sc. 1.
“WAS THE FIRST JUSTICE HARLAN ANTI-CHINESE?”

[T]o be labeled a prophet is to be held to an impossible standard. In many ways, Harlan’s views fell short of our current notions of racial equality. But Harlan was not a philosopher; he was a judge. His job was not to divine eternal truths, but to make socially situated legal judgments. It is correct to say that Harlan’s views on race were as problematic in some ways as they were progressive in others. But in reaching that conclusion, we benefit from a century’s worth of hindsight and experience that Harlan did not have.
Boundary regulation in social media

The management of group context in socially mediating technologies is an important challenge for the design community. To better understand how users manage group context, we explored the practice of multiple profile management in social media. In doing so, we observed creative and opportunistic strategies for group context management. We found that multiple profile maintenance is motivated by four factors: privacy, identity, utility, and propriety. Drawing on these motives, we observe a continuum of boundary regulation behaviors: pseudonymity, practical obscurity, and transparent separation. Based on these findings, we encourage designers of group context management systems to more broadly consider motives and practices of group separations in social media. Group context management systems should be privacy-enhancing, but a singular focus on privacy overlooks a range of other group context management practices.
Women, Work, and Culture

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labor supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying second-generation American women. I use both female LFP and attitudes in the women's country of ancestry as cultural proxies and show that both cultural proxies have quantitatively significant effects on women's work outcomes. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future empirical and theoretical research topics in this area.
Existence of equilibrium in large double auctions

Abstract We show the existence of a pure strategy, symmetric, increasing equilibrium in double auction markets with correlated, conditionally independent private values and many participants. The equilibrium we find is arbitrarily close to fully revealing as the market size grows. Our results provide strategic foundations for price-taking behavior in large markets.
Uncomfortable Embrace: Federal Corporate Ownership in the Midst of the Financial Crisis

The federal government struggled mightily to rescue the financial system during the panic of fall 2008. The government’s hurried, frenetic response can be described as “regulation by deal,” a term David Zaring and I coined to explain the ad hoc process by which the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury Department) attempted to rescue failing financial firms and resolve the market crisis within the limits of their legal power.1 When the government concluded its dealmaking, it was left an unwilling holder of debt and equity interests throughout the financial sector. For good measure, it also owned sizable equity stakes in two of the country’s three largest automotive manufacturers. The structure of this ownership was a product of the Treasury Department’s “regulation by deal” approach. The Treasury Department did not use any single template. Instead, each new rescue and deal brought different ownership terms and models. The government effectively nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; took controlling equity interests in General Motors (GM), GMAC, and American International Group, Inc. (AIG); acquired noncontrolling equity and debt interests in Citigroup and Chrysler; and purchased nonvoting preferred securities in
The history and performance of concept stocks

Abstract This study investigates the performance of firms with extremely high levels of market to sales value (“concept stocks”). To many observers, these stocks appear overvalued. However, proponents argue that because of their unique characteristics, traditional pricing models fail to value these firms correctly. Ex post, the debate can be resolved through an analysis of the long-term performance of concept stocks. En route to testing the implied overpricing hypothesis we document several important findings. First, the identity and characteristics of concept stocks have changed markedly over time. Although the obvious recent examples are internet and biotech stocks, concept stocks vary widely by industry over the past four decades. The industries containing the most popular concept stocks evolve from oil and gas extraction in the 1960s and 1970s, to computer and office equipment in the 1980s, and to computer-related services in the 1990s. Second, although concept stocks tend to be young, small, growth stocks in the 1990s, they exhibit a wide range of characteristics throughout the sample period. Third, the relative pricing of concept stocks (compared to either a control sample or the entire population) has changed dramatically over time. The average concept stock sold for approximately three times sales in the late 1960s and 1970s, five times sales in the 1980s and nearly 17 times sales in the 1990s. Finally, we find evidence supporting the overpricing hypothesis. Concept stocks under-perform significantly in the long run. This under-performance is more severe for Nasdaq firms and in the most recent two decades. The results are separate from glamour, IPO, industry, or contrarian effects and remain after an extensive sensitivity analysis.
Political Constraints and Public Support for Market Reform

As concerns of "reform fatigue" in lower- and middle-income countries have become more widespread, so has the search for ways of boosting support for market-oriented reforms. Although the effects of political institutions on reform results have been extensively analyzed, there has been relatively little investigation of their effects on public opinion. We argue that constitutional and extra-constitutional reforms that place limits on the discretionary authority of public officials and enable voters to monitor, reward, and sanction politicians can enhance the legitimacy of market reforms. We present a voting model with asymmetric information to illustrate that these formal-legal reforms provide a credible signal of reformers' commitments. Using panel data based on public opinion barometers from Eastern Europe and Latin America, we examine the effects of political authority on public support for markets. We find that constraints on the power of the executive branch boost support for markets but that this effect declines as the reform process matures. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund
Talk and Action: What Individual Investors Say and What They Do

Combining survey responses and trading records of clients of a German retail broker, this paper examines some of the causes for the apparent failure to buy and hold a well-diversified portfolio. The subjective investor attributes gleaned from the survey help explain the variation in actual portfolio and trading choices. Self-reported risk aversion is the single most important determ- inant of both portfolio diversification and turnover; other things equal, investors who report being more risk tolerant hold less diversified portfolios and trade more aggressively. Less experienced investors similarly tend to churn poorly diversified portfolios. The effect of perceived knowledge on portfolio choice is less clear cut; holding other attributes constant, investors who think themselves knowledgeable about financial securities indeed hold better diversified portfolios, but those who think themselves more knowledgeable than the average investor churn their portfolios more.
“International Economic Law”: Implications for Scholarship

The term "international economic law" is coming into wider use. This essay suggests that the rise of "international economic law" is less a result of external changes in rules and institutions than of internal changes in perception, especially about scholarship. The growing use of "international economic law" reflects a new set of intellectual boundaries among interested scholars. One of these boundary shifts is a new line of demarcation that sets off international economic law from the larger discipline of international law, reflecting the sheer importance of the subject. The other boundary changes, however, eliminate barriers between areas of scholarship previously considered separate. International economic law brings together the rules and institutions (predominantly national, or even private) that directly affect international business transactions with those (predominantly international or transnational) that shape the economic relationships among nations and other public actors. This essay considers why "international economic law" is winning acceptance, and what its adoption implies for scholarship.
The Shadow of State Secrets

INTRODUCTION 78 I. GOVERNMENT CONTRACTORS AND STATE SECRETS 91 A. Breach of Contract, Patent Disputes, and Trade Secrets 99 B. Negligence, Wrongful Death, and Bodily Injury 105 1. Product Liability 106 2. Infrastructure and Services 112 3. Conduct of War 115 C. State Secrets as a Litigation Strategy 129 II. TELECOMMUNICATIONS CASES 139 A. Executive Branch Jurisprudence and State Secrets 141 B. The Onslaught of Litigation 145 C. State Secrets, Judicial Independence, and Congressional Action 150 D. State Secrets in the Aftermath 160 III. LEGAL CHALLENGES BROUGHT AGAINST U.S. OFFICIALS AND AGENCIES 166 A. Fourth and Fifth Amendment Violations 169 B. Due Process, Torture, and Detention Without Trial 184
The Great Recession and its Implications for Community Policing

During the last twenty years, community policing has been the dominant approach to local law enforcement. Community policing is based, in part, on the broken windows theory of public safety. The broken windows theory suggests a link between low-level crime and violent crime — that is, if minor offenses are allowed to pervade a community, they will lead to a proliferation of crime and, ultimately, a community plagued by violent crime. To maintain a perception of community orderliness, many local governments adopted “order maintenance” laws — such as panhandling ordinances and anti-homeless statutes. This emphasis on cracking down on such low-level offenses brought with it an increase in the needs and costs of policing, prosecutions, jails, social services, and other related resources.When the economy was flourishing, local governments were able to pay for the time- and resource-intensive broken windows approach to community policing. The Great Recession, however, has forced localities to think critically about whether they can sustain these practices given budget cuts. This Article analyzes the effects that the downturn in the economy has had on public safety budgets and the changes that many local governments have made, and are continuing to make, to adjust to decreasing revenue and resources. This Article will also explore proposed changes to the current criminal justice and social service systems that seek cost-effective approaches to deliver the same level of public safety to which communities are accustomed. In particular, this Article will assess and evaluate evidence-based decision-making — an emerging trend in some criminal justice systems — as part of an evolving trend driven by the effects of the Great Recession, but also stemming out of community policing. Finally, this Article will use Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, as an example of an evidence-based decision-making approach and explain how it can fulfill the public safety goals of the broken windows theory of community policing while creating a framework that provides for “smart” decision-making that accounts for the financial realities that most cities face.
The Situational Impact of Brand Image Beliefs

This study experimentally examines some situational influences on the formation and consequences of two brand image beliefs, pertaining to fun and sophistication (classiness). It tests McCracken's (1986) meaning transfer mechanisms and establishes that nonverbalized personality associations of celebrity endorsers on these dimensions can indeed reinforce equivalent consumer beliefs about a brand's fun and classiness benefits. However, this occurs only if a social consumption context is evoked, and only if the brand image beliefs are appropriate to the consumer schema for the product category involved. Moreover, under these facilitating conditions, such ad-created brand image beliefs have an impact only on brand purchase intentions and not on brand attitudes. Results have implications for the growing literature on different types of brand imagery associations, as well as for future research on the processing of nonverbal stimuli, the measurement of nonfunctional brand beliefs, and consumer inference processes.
Explaining Asset Mispricing Using the Resale Option and Inflation Illusion

We investigate the overconfidence theory and inflation-illusion hypothesis of asset mispricing. Both concepts address subjective asset valuation but place the impetus on differing explanations within the standard dividend-growth model. We find that one of the theoretical outcomes of overconfidence—asset turnover—consistently explains mispricing in U.S. housing markets. Further, we find that asset turnover subsumes expected inflation in certain specifications, suggesting that dispersion in investors' beliefs is a better explanation of asset mispricing than the investors' inability to properly discount future cash flows.
SPECIALIZATION AND THE SKILL PREMIUM IN THE 20TH CENTURY

The skill premium fell substantially in the first part of the 20th century and then rose at the end of the century. I argue that these changes are connected to the organization of production. When production is organized into large plants, jobs become routinized, favoring less-skilled workers. A model is introduced that parameterizes capital's ability to do many tasks, that is, capital's flexibility. When calibrated to data on the distribution of plant sizes, the model can account for between half and two-thirds of the movement in the skill premium over the century.
Is Noise Trading Cancelled Out by Aggregation

Conventional wisdom suggests that investors' independent biases should cancel each other out and have little impact on equilibrium at the aggregate level. In contrast to this intuition, this paper analyzes models with biased investors and finds that biases often have a significant impact on the equilibrium even if they are independent across investors. First, independent biases affect the equilibrium asset price if investor demand for the asset is a nonlinear function of the bias. Second, even if the demand function is linear in the bias, it may still have a significant impact on the equilibrium because of the fluctuation of the wealth distribution. An initial run-up of the stock price makes optimistic investors richer, which then further pushes the stock price up and leads to lower future returns. This effect can lead to price overshooting, i.e., a negative expected future return. Similarly, an initial drop of the stock price leads to higher future returns. Simple calibrations show that a modest amount of biases can have a large impact on the equilibrium.
Understanding the determinants of managerial ownership and the link between ownership and performance

Both managerial ownership and performance are endogenously determined by exogenous (and only partly observed) changes in the "rm’s contracting environment. We extend the cross-sectional results of Demsetz and Lehn (1985) ( Journal of Political Economy, 93, 1155}1177) and use panel data to show that managerial ownership is explained by key variables in the contracting environment in ways consistent with the predictions of principal-agent models. A large fraction of the cross-sectional variation in managerial ownership is explained by unobserved "rm heterogeneity. Moreover, after
A MULTI-DOMAIN HYBRID METHOD FOR HEAD-ON COLLISION OF BLACK HOLES IN PARTICLE LIMIT

A hybrid method is developed based on the spectral and finite-difference methods for solving the inhomogeneous Zerilli equation in time-domain. The developed hybrid method decomposes the domain into the spectral and finite-difference domains. The singular source term is located in the spectral domain while the solution in the region without the singular term is approximated by the higher-order finite-difference method. The spectral domain is also split into multi-domains and the finite-difference domain is placed as the boundary domain. Due to the global nature of the spectral method, a multi-domain method composed of the spectral domain only does not yield the proper power-law decay unless the range of the computational domain is large. The finite-difference domain helps reduce boundary effects due to the truncation of the computational domain. The multi-domain approach with the finite-difference boundary domain method reduces the computational cost significantly and also yields the proper power-law decay. Stable and accurate interface conditions between the finite-difference and spectral domains and the spectral and spectral domains are derived. For the singular source term, we use both the Gaussian model with various values of full width at half-maximum and a localized discrete δ-function. The discrete δ-function was generalized to adopt the Gauss–Lobatto collocation points of the spectral domain. The gravitational waveforms are measured. Numerical results show that the developed hybrid method accurately yields the quasi-normal modes and the power-law decay profile. The numerical results also show that the power-law decay profile is less sensitive to the shape of the regularized δ-function for the Gaussian model than expected. The Gaussian model also yields better results than the localized discrete δ-function.
The bias in Black-Scholes/Black implied volatility: An analysis of equity and energy markets

In this paper we examine the extent of the bias between Black and Scholes (1973)/Black (1976) implied volatility and realized term volatility in the equity and energy markets. Explicitly modeling a market price of volatility risk, we extend previous work by demonstrating that Black-Scholes is an upward-biased predictor of future realized volatility in S&P 500/S&P 100 stock-market indices. Turning to the Black options-on-futures formula, we apply our methodology to options on energy contracts, a market in which crises are characterized by a positive correlation between price-returns and volatilities: After controlling for both term-structure and seasonality effects, our theoretical and empirical findings suggest a similar upward bias in the volatility implied in energy options contracts. We show the bias in both Black-Scholes/Black implied volatilities to be related to a negative market price of volatility risk.
Exploring Higher Order Risk Effects

Higher-order risk effects play an important role in examining economic behavior under uncertainty. A precautionary demand for saving has been linked to the property of prudence and the property of temperance has been used to show how the presence of an unavoidable risk affects one’s behavior towards a second risk. These two properties also play key roles in aversion to negative skewness and to kurtosis, respectively. Both properties recently have been characterized by preferences over lottery pairs in simple 50-50 gambles. The simplicity of this characterization is ideal for experimental investigation. This article reports the results of such experiments and concludes that there is behavioral evidence for prudence, but not for temperance. Implications of these results for both expected-utility and non-expected-utility models are examined.
Examining social processes with agent-based models

It is plain that the Austrian revival that began in the 1970s has yet to succeed in convincing the mainstream of the academy to jettison their physics-based mathematical models in favor of the sort of models and forms of argumentation that contemporary Austrians advocate. Agent-based computational modeling is still in its relative infancy but is beginning to gain recognition among economists disenchanted with the neoclassical paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to assuage concerns that readers might have regarding methodological consistency between agent-based modeling and Austrian economics and to advocate its adoption as a means to convey Austrian ideas to a wider audience. I examine models developed and published by other researchers and ultimately provide an outline of how one might develop a research agenda that leverages this technique. I argue that agent-based modeling can be used to enhance Austrian theorizing and offers a viable alternative to the neoclassical paradigm.
An Essay on the Stages of the Clinical Year in Law School: Group Process with Existentialist Roots

This short essay focuses on “units,” or stages of group process, part of my shared experience in law teaching and in adult education at St. Mark’s Church, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. The article explores the context of the functional education program of church teaching and its common elements with clinical law teaching. In my own experience, the unit structure from church teaching translates well into the structure of clinical legal education.
Making order of disorder: a call for conceptual clarity*

Over the past several years, social science has not been kind to brokenwindows theory. Various critiques have led some scholars to conclude thatthe “theoretical arc of the broken windows or incivilities thesis has at theleast flattened out and may be in decline” (Taylor, 2006:1625). Criticismssurface on several dimensions. Among the most scathing, Harcourt (2001)takes issue with the concept of “disorder,” claiming it is socially con-structed, variable, and biased against lower class culture. He also chal-lenges the notion that disorder and crime are related. In his reanalysis ofSkogan’s (1990) data, Harcourt documents no support for a disorder-crimerelationship, finding “no statistically significant relationships between dis-order and purse snatching, physical assault, burglary, or rape when otherexplanatory variables are held constant” (p. 78).Other studies grant that although disorder and crime may be related,the nature and strength of the relationship are questionable. Sampson andRaudenbush (2001:4) find it is the structural characteristics of neighbor-hoods, as well as neighborhood cohesion and informal social control (i.e.,collective efficacy)—not levels of disorder—that most affect crime. Andother studies similarly document that disorder takes a back seat to morepowerfully predictive aspects of neighborhood fabric such as status andstability (Taylor, 2008; see also Taylor, 2001).Social science also has not been kind to the most common policyresponse based on the broken windows perspective: order maintenancepolicing.
Congressional Papers and Judicial Subpoenas and the Constitution

Some contemporary Congresses have lost sight of the original scope of their predecessors' assertions of privilege and now claim an absolute privilege to withhold both the originals and copies of subpoenaed papers. A few judicial opinions suggest as much or more. It is possible that even cursorily documented, ill-considered dicta can take root and flourish, and to prevent that, this article This article charts the constitutional boundaries of Congress' privilege to withhold its internal papers from judicial subpoena. It surveys the privileges expressly given Congress in the text of the Constitution as well as the privileges that might be implied from our constitutional structure and history. This examination reveals that while the Constitution does give Congress the privilege of refusing to comply with subpoenas for documents in limited circumstances, it does not supply the absolute, unreviewable power that, in the view of some observers, Congress has arrogated to itself.
Experiments in International Criminal Justice: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

A number of important legal and institutional experiments have been undertaken at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a UN-backed tribunal established to try some of the most egregious crimes of the Pol Pot era. The ECCC is the first UN-supported hybrid criminal tribunal to mandate a majority of national judges and to divide key legal and administrative offices and funding mechanisms into distinct national and international sides. It also draws more heavily than any prior internationalized mass crimes process from the civil law tradition, including expansive roles for investigating judges and an ambitious mechanism permitting certain survivors to join the proceedings as civil parties. These experimental features — most of which were accepted reluctantly by the United Nations during difficult negotiations with the Cambodian government — have sometimes compromised the ECCC’s capacity to conduct fair, expeditious proceedings and carry out its administrative functions efficiently and transparently. This article traces some of the effects of the ECCC’s unique institutional features on various aspects of its performance and draws lessons that can help inform the design and management of mass crimes proceedings going forward.
Tax, Command -- or Nudge?: Evaluating the New Regulation

This Article compares for the first time the relative economic efficiency of “nudges” and other forms of behaviorally-inspired regulation against more common policy alternatives, such as taxes, subsidies, or traditional quantity regulation. Environmental economists and some legal commentators have dismissed nudge-type interventions out of hand for their failure to match the revenues and informational benefits taxes can provide. Similarly, writers in the law and economics tradition argue that fines are generally superior to non-pecuniary punishments. Drawing on prior work in the choice-of-instruments literature, and contrary to this popular wisdom, I show that nudges may out-perform fines, other Pigouvian taxes, or subsidies in some contexts. These same arguments may also imply the superiority of some traditional “command and control” regulations over their tax or subsidy alternatives. I then apply these lessons to a set of contemporary policy controversies, such as New York City’s cap on beverage portion sizes, climate change, retirement savings, and charitable contributions.
Gravity in International Finance

Abstract The past decade has witnessed an explosion of papers estimating gravity equations for cross-border financial holdings without much of a theoretical foundation. In this paper we develop a theory for bilateral asset holdings that takes a gravity form. We discuss how to estimate international financial frictions and conduct comparative statics analysis within the context of the theory. We also find though that reasonable extensions of the model no longer generate a gravity form. While this does not significantly complicate estimation and comparative statics analysis, it raises questions about the empirical validity of gravity specifications for cross-border financial holdings that need to be addressed in future work.
Familiarity Breeds Investment

Shareholders of a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) tend to live in the area which it serves, and an RBOC’s customers tend to hold its shares rather than other RBOCs’ equity. The geographic bias of the RBOC investors is closely related to the general tendency of households’ portfolios to be concentrated, of employees’ tendency to own their employers’ stocks in their retirement accounts, and to the home country bias in the international arena. Together, these phenomena provide compeling evidence that people invest in the familiar while often ignoring the principles of portfolio theory. Traditional economic models posit investors who have beliefs about future payoffs of assets. Each investor selects his portfolio so as to maximize the expected utility of the portfolio’s payoff. Investors’ aversion to risk implies that their portfolios should be diversified. In particular, they will greatly benefit from international diversification. Nonetheless, people tend to ignore this advice: by and large, investors’ money stays in their home countries. Kang and Stulz (1997) observe: “Many Financial Economists have noticed that even though the barriers to international investment have fallen dramatically, foreign ownership of shares is still extremely limited and much smaller than one would expect in the absence of barriers to international investment.” An article in the Economist (1996), “Stay-at-Home Shareholders,” concludes: “It appears, therefore, that foreign investment has been hampered, at least until recently, by many of the factors that common sense would suggest: capital controls, opaque markets, and the high cost for fund managers of setting up overseas. In the past few years, these barriers have been falling—especially in emerging markets, where the gains from diversifying are biggest. So investors should soon start gobbling up foreign shares in record numbers. If they do not, economists may have to diversify into other theories.” This article offers a novel explanation of the home country bias: people simply prefer to invest in the familiar. People root for the home team, and feel comfortable investing their money in a business that is visible to them. Paucity of international diversification is only one of the implications of this tendency to invest in the familiar.
Federalism and Political Competition in Emerging Democracies

Political competition is essential to the development and maintenance of a healthy and stable democracy. Current scholarship has largely ignored the role that federalism can play in fostering meaningful political competition in emerging democracies. This Article aims to fill this void by developing a theory of political competition within federal systems based on a formal game theory model created by economist and Nobel Laureate Roger B. Myerson. The Article argues that constructive political competition is especially difficult in emerging democracies because social and economic exigencies create strong incentives for new leadership to quash opposition and because first-time voters do not have a point of comparison by which to judge their first set of democratic leaders. Unitary regimes exacerbate these problems because they create an all-or-nothing political scenario and provide voters with only one point of political comparison. Federal systems, on the other hand, create multiple political arenas. This means that political opposition can be contained without being quashed, and that voters will have multiple points of political comparison. After exploring the necessary parameters of this model, the Article then applies the model to post-apartheid South Africa, which has been controlled by a single political party since the country’s first democratic election in 1994. The Article concludes that South Africa’s federal structure is gradually fostering constructive political competition as the model suggests and that opposition parties in South Africa are well situated to take further advantage of these opportunities in the future.
The Indiana University Advanced Research and Technology Institute: A Case Study

The Indiana University Advanced Research and Technology Institute (ARTI) is the technology transfer organ of the Indiana University system. ARTI’s structure is complex, and has been dynamic since its creation in 1996. This complexity stems in part from the diversity represented by the Indiana University system and from competing interests within the university itself. In addition to the intrinsic value of higher education, the university has the potential to add substantial value to Indiana’s economic landscape through technology transfer, economic development initiatives and the resulting job creation, but realizing that potential will require effectively leveraging a disconnected network including the IU campuses and critical capabilities contributed by the state’s other world class institutions. This paper reviews the formation of ARTI, a discussion of its structure and evolving mission, recent initiatives and some possible metrics for technology transfer initiatives.
A Classification Model for Sensing Human Trust in Machines Using EEG and GSR

Today, intelligent machines interact and collaborate with humans in a way that demands a greater level of trust between human and machine. A first step toward building intelligent machines that are capable of building and maintaining trust with humans is the design of a sensor that will enable machines to estimate human trust level in real time. In this article, two approaches for developing classifier-based empirical trust-sensor models are presented that specifically use electroencephalography and galvanic skin response measurements. Human subject data collected from 45 participants is used for feature extraction, feature selection, classifier training, and model validation. The first approach considers a general set of psychophysiological features across all participants as the input variables and trains a classifier-based model for each participant, resulting in a trust-sensor model based on the general feature set (i.e., a “general trust-sensor model”). The second approach considers a customized feature set for each individual and trains a classifier-based model using that feature set, resulting in improved mean accuracy but at the expense of an increase in training time. This work represents the first use of real-time psychophysiological measurements for the development of a human trust sensor. Implications of the work, in the context of trust management algorithm design for intelligent machines, are also discussed.
Optimally Investing to Reach a Bequest Goal

Abstract We determine the optimal strategy for investing in a Black–Scholes market in order to maximize the probability that wealth at death meets a bequest goal b , a type of goal-seeking problem, as pioneered by Dubins and Savage (1965, 1976). The individual consumes at a constant rate c , so the level of wealth required for risklessly meeting consumption equals c / r , in which r is the rate of return of the riskless asset. Our problem is related to, but different from, the goal-reaching problems of Browne (1997). First, Browne (1997, Section 3.1) maximizes the probability that wealth reaches b c / r before it reaches a b . Browne’s game ends when wealth reaches b . By contrast, for the problem we consider, the game continues until the individual dies or until wealth reaches 0; reaching b and then falling below it before death does not count. Second, Browne (1997, Section 4.2) maximizes the expected discounted reward of reaching b > c / r before wealth reaches c / r . If one interprets his discount rate as a hazard rate, then our two problems are mathematically equivalent for the special case for which b > c / r , with ruin level c / r . However, we obtain different results because we set the ruin level at 0, thereby allowing the game to continue when wealth falls below c / r .
Federal Rule 11 and Public Interest Litigation

Twenty-five years ago, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to provide sanctions against attorneys who sue without sound factual basis or for improper purpose. Rule 11 thus created an objective standard, requiring offending attorneys to pay the fees of opposing counsel. This article analyzes the policies affected and argues the amendments to Rule 11 run counter to the values advanced by public interest litigation.
Confidence intervals for probabilities of default

Abstract In this paper we conduct a systematic comparison of confidence intervals around estimated probabilities of default (PD) using several analytical approaches as well as parametric and nonparametric bootstrap methods. We do so for two different PD estimation methods, cohort and duration (intensity), with 22 years of credit ratings data. We find that the bootstrapped intervals for the duration-based estimates are relatively tight when compared to either analytic or bootstrapped intervals around the less efficient cohort estimator. We show how the large differences between the point estimates and confidence intervals of these two estimators are consistent with non-Markovian migration behavior. Surprisingly, even with these relatively tight confidence intervals, it is impossible to distinguish notch-level PDs for investment grade ratings, e.g. a PDAA− from a PDA+. However, once the speculative grade barrier is crossed, we are able to distinguish quite cleanly notch-level estimated PDs. Conditioning on the state of the business cycle helps: it is easier to distinguish adjacent PDs in recessions than in expansions.
Does Sentiment Drive the Retail Demand for IPOs

Individual and institutional investors can trade German initial public equity offerings on an as-if/when-issued basis before the start of secondary trading. Using actual when-issued trades made by a sample of clients at a large German retail broker during 1999 and 2000, the paper documents that retail buyers consistently overpay for initial public offerings (IPOs) in the when-issued market relative to the immediate aftermarket. The observed willingness to overpay points to sentiment as a driver of retail trading decisions. Consistent with this interpretation and with sentiment affecting prices, IPOs that are aggressively bought by individuals in the when-issued market exhibit high first-day returns as well as poor aftermarket returns relative to benchmarks of similar stocks.
Some issues arising in the presentation of statistical testimony

This article describes some special problems facing expert witnesses presenting statistical evidence when they testify in court. Since the legal system, especially in civil cases, serves as a dispute resolution process that needs to reach a decision in a timely manner, its objectives and procedures differ from those in pure science. Unlike the classroom or summarizing their research in a talk where the statistician determines the presentation, in the courtroom a witness is only allowed to answer questions posed by the others, mainly the lawyers for both parties. One case where the author could not persuade the lawyer to ask a set of questions designed to show that the other ‘expert’ was using a statistical that had no power and consequently would never indicate that the data were consistent with discrimination is described. In contrast, a case where the judge understood the need for the data analysis to correspond to the time frame of the case and accepted the Mantel–Haenszel test as an appropriate way to analyse stratified data arising in a discrimination case is summarized. Several suggestions designed to improve the effectiveness of statistical testimony and related issues arising in Daubert hearings that screen proposed expert analyses for scientific reliability are given. Recently, a distinguished scientist wrote an editorial in Science that supported epidemiologists who had obtained data solely for use in a case but later submitted an article to a journal, apparently in violation of the court’s order. The last section questions this view as it diminishes the value of commitments researchers give the public when they obtain information about individuals and recommends that statisticians obtain permission to write an article based on their research at the time they are engaged.