cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Noncompliance with Mandatory Disclosure Requirements: The Magnitude and Determinants of Undisclosed Permanently Reinvested Earnings

ABSTRACT: We develop estimates of a firm's foreign earnings designated as permanently reinvested (PRE) and the unrecorded deferred tax liability (TAX) associated with PRE that are independent of whether a firm explicitly discloses this information. We then investigate firms' noncompliance with Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 740 provisions that require financial statement disclosure of PRE and either the tax associated with PRE or a statement that calculating the tax is not practicable. We find that a nontrivial portion of firms do not comply with the PRE disclosure requirements and that the amounts of undisclosed PRE and the related tax are substantial in magnitude. Cross-sectional evidence suggests managers opportunistically choose when to disclose PRE and TAX and that compliance with PRE disclosure requirements increased following the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which increased incentives to disclose PRE. JEL Classifications: M40; M41; H25; K34. Data Availability: Data used in this stud...
Distortion Other Than Price Distortion

Financial disclosure fraud is economically harmful not only because it hurts buyers and sellers of public company stock — though it certainly hurts some — but because it produces considerable economic consequences that are not fully captured by stock price movements. A significant portion of welfare losses caused by financial manipulation is the product of the distortion in capital allocation, and resulting changes in investment, employment, and output, all of which are used to detect, avoid, exploit, or cover up the misrepresentation. Fraud firms’ disclosures are used by other firms in their own investment decisions, spreading welfare losses beyond the fraud firm like fruit rot.In light of these observations, the Article suggests that fraud-on-the-market litigation should not be understood primarily as a remedy for victimized shareholders, who can often eliminate the cost of fraud ex ante, but as a quasi qui tam cause of action available to purchasers and sellers of (usually equity) securities to police economically-harmful false disclosures by public companies. Even in cases where buyers and sellers of stock are not the class most significantly harmed by disclosure fraud, they nearly always suffer some identifiable losses, thus avoiding difficult evidentiary questions about standing. When viewed through this lens, many of the objections to securities litigation become moot and some of its virtues are revealed.
Tax competition and tax structure in open federal economies: Evidence from OECD countries with implications for the European Union

Tax competition arguments suggest that governments that operate in an open economy (such as local governments) should not and will not rely on non-benefit taxes, such as the income tax. Yet we observe reliance on income taxes by local governments in many countries, and such reliance changes over time. Evidence from a panel data set of 13 OECD countries over the period 1975-1984 suggests that competition between levels of government (resulting in a vertical fiscal externality) and between levels of government at the same level (resulting in a horizontal fiscal externality) provide some economic rationale for these changes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the vertical and horizontal fiscal externalities interact. These results have some interesting implications for fiscal policy in the European Union, particulary as the EU continues to evolve. One implication for the EU is that enlargement that increases tax base disparities within the EU (and is not accompanied by an EU-level income tax) will tend to lower national income tax rates, although this must be qualified because it also depends on the mobility of the population. A second implication is that fiscal expansion of the EU to include an EU-levelincome tax may tend to lower the reliance of national governments on income taxes through the vertical externality, but may also tend to equalize tax bases across countries, and so increase reliance on national income taxes through the horizontal externality.
Powerful Trend Function Tests That Are Robust to Strong Serial Correlation, With an Application to the Prebisch–Singer Hypothesis

We propose tests for hypotheses on the parameters of the deterministic trend function of a univariate time series. The tests do not require knowledge of the form of serial correlation in the data, and they are robust to strong serial correlation. The data can contain a unit root and still have the correct size asymptotically. The tests that we analyze are standard heteroscedasticity autocorrelation robust tests based on nonparametric kernel variance estimators. We analyze these tests using the fixed-b asymptotic framework recently proposed by Kiefer and Vogelsang. This analysis allows us to analyze the power properties of the tests with regard to bandwidth and kernel choices. Our analysis shows that among popular kernels, specific kernel and bandwidth choices deliver tests with maximal power within a specific class of tests. Based on the theoretical results, we propose a data-dependent bandwidth rule that maximizes integrated power. Our recommended test is shown to have power that dominates a related test...
How Can Economic Interests Influence Support for Free Trade

Recent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self-interest. The skeptical view suggests that long-standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one's own material well-being. We believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons. First, the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand. This problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy. Second, the understanding of self-interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow. In reality, the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one's position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences. We use the data employed by Mansfield and Mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role.1
The Reasonable Person in Trademark Law

=l023930 (last visited Jan. 15, 2008). 23. 4 MCCARTHY, supra note 7, § 23:58. 24. Bartow, supra note 18, at 817 ("[C]ourts should consistently embrace something along the lines of the ' reasonably careful purchaser,' with the approximate purchasing sophistication of the judge deciding the issue-a creature far more intelligent and discerning than the consumers currently manifest in trademark jurisprudence."). 786 SAINT LOUIS UN IVERS flY L4 W JOURNAL [Vol. 52:781 beings able to make judgments for themselves in the vast majority of cases. Rather, the point is that as we teach students trademark law, we should remind them that, as in tort law, the "reasonable person" is a judicial construct-one purportedly based on empirical evidence, but a construct nonetheless? There are different ways one might sensitize students to the multiple consumers for whom the "reasonable consumer" is a proxy. One way might be to take advantage of Rebecca Tushnet' s tremendous database of audiovisual materials, described elsewhere in this issue, to assist students in engaging with these marks in ways different from their own experience. Given, as Barton Beebe has discovered, that the similarity of the marks is one of the most important factors in a judicial finding of confusion, it would seem important for students (and courts) to consider the aspects of the "reasonably prudent consumer" that might cause that consumer to think that two marks are similar or dissimilar. If, as is often the case, courts look to a consideration of "sound, sight, and meaning" to determine whether two marks are similar, we might want to help students to consider to what degree there is variation in how consumers engage with trademarks in these three respects.
On the tradeoff between cultural sensitivity and aggregate size in population control policy

Recently, Batabyal proposed an unconventional population control policy that is sensitive to the cultural desire for male progeny in many Asian nations. Although the proposed policy is culturally sensitive, a potential problem with this policy is that the aggregate size of the national population that is sought to be controlled may be quite high. Consequently, this note addresses the tradeoff between cultural sensitivity and aggregate population size. Specifically, the study analyses the properties of a modified policy that is desirable not only because it is culturally sensitive but also because it caps the aggregate size of individual families and thereby the size of the national population.
Restorative Processes & Doing Justice

This essay argues that, while many restorative processes are quite valuable, there is the potential for their use to produce results that conflict with the community's shared intuitions of justice and to thereby undermine the criminal law's moral credibility. Because such moral credibility can have practical crime-control value, it ought not be undermined unless the crime-control benefits of doing so clearly outweigh the costs. In practice, it is entirely possible to rely upon restorative processes in ways that avoid injustice and that assure justice is done.
Information aggregation around macroeconomic announcements: Revisions matter.

Abstract I show that an empirical relation exists between stock returns on macroeconomic news announcement days and the future revisions of the released data but that this link differs across the business cycle. Using three major macroeconomic series that undergo significant revisions (nonfarm payroll, gross domestic product, and industrial production), I present evidence that daily returns on the Standard & Poor's 500 index and revisions are positively related in expansions and negatively related in recessions. The results suggest that revisions do matter, i.e., that investors care about the final revised value of a macroeconomic series, that they infer accurate information from the release of the preliminary inaccurate report, and that the more precise information is aggregated into prices on the day of the initial announcement. The results are consistent with the predictions of rational expectations trading models around public announcements combined with well-established empirical results on the asymmetric interpretation of information across the business cycle.
Clinical Cognitive Dissonance: The Values and Goals of Domestic Violence Clinics, the Legal System, and the Students Caught in the Middle

After the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination found probable cause to believe that Harvard University had discriminated against her by denying her tenure, Clare Dalton could have done any number of things. What Professor Dalton ultimately chose to do, however, was to start a law school clinic to meet the legal needs of women subjected to abuse. The settlement Professor Dalton negotiated required that Harvard fund Northeastern University School of Law's Domestic Violence Institute ("DVI"), which she directed until 2005. The DVI educates law students about domestic violence and gives them the opportunity to learn from and about women subjected to abuse through various clinical components. The DVI's programs include a partnership with the Boston Medical Center, through which first
A General Approach to Integrated Risk Management with Skewed, Fat-tailed Risks *

Abstract Integrated risk management for financial institutions requires an approach for aggregating risk types (market, credit, and operational) whose distributional shapes vary considerably. We construct the joint risk distribution for a typical large, internationally active bank using the method of copulas. This technique allows us to incorporate realistic marginal distributions that capture essential empirical features of these risks such as skewness and fat-tails while allowing for a rich dependence structure. We explore the impact of business mix and inter-risk correlations on total risk. We then compare the copula-based method with several conventional approaches to computing risk.
Catholic schools, competition, and public school quality

Abstract Catholic schools compete with public schools but may also cream-skim. The endogeneity of private school enrollment necessitates 2SLS. Measures of Catholic sex abuse scandals instrument for Catholic school enrollment. We find that competition from Catholic schools raises public school test scores.
How Does the Impact of an HIV/AIDS Information Campaign Vary With Educational Attainment? Evidence From Rural Uganda

The responsiveness to information is thought to be one channel through which education affects health outcomes. The author tests this hypothesis by examining the effectiveness of an information campaign that aims at preventing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda. Previous studies in the epidemiological literature have generally concluded that, in Africa, there was either a positive association or no association between HIV infection and schooling levels. Using individual level data from a cohort study following the general population of a cluster of villages in rural Uganda over 12 years, the author shows that, after more than a decade of prevention campaigns about the dangers of the epidemic, there has been a substantial evolution in the HIV/education gradient. Early in the epidemic, in 1990, there was no robust relation between HIV/AIDS and education. In 2000, among young individuals, in particular among females, education lowers the risk of being HIV positive. Results on HIV incidence in a duration framework confirm that finding by establishing that, for young individuals, education reduces the probability of seroconversion. These findings reveal that educated individuals have been more responsive to the HIV/AIDS information campaigns. The analysis of sexual behavior reinforces that conclusion: condom use is associated positively with schooling levels.
An Experimental Test for “Backlash” Against Social Pressure Techniques Used to Mobilize Voters:

This research explores the possibility of psychological reactance, or “backlash,” against political candidates who use social pressure to mobilize voters. There is a compelling theoretical argument and solid empirical evidence suggesting social pressure substantially increases voter turnout. There is, however, equally noteworthy evidence suggesting social pressure frequently stimulates a negative reaction in targets. This research uses a lab-in-the-field experimental design that employs a hypothetical social pressure message to evaluate whether a candidate’s use of social pressure to turnout voters may increase anger and hostility toward that candidate, possibly to the point it increases the likelihood a citizen will actually vote against that candidate. Our findings indicate social pressure mobilization techniques evoke consequential psychological reactance against their sponsor. Until future research can further assess these effects, we suggest social pressure mobilization techniques should be used by c...
Can International Election Monitoring Harm Governance

The monitoring of elections by international groups has become widespread. But can it have unintended negative consequences for governance? We argue that high-quality election monitoring, by preventing certain forms of manipulation such as stuffing ballot boxes, can unwittingly induce incumbents to resort to tactics of election manipulation that are more damaging to domestic institutions, governance, and freedoms. These tactics include rigging courts and administrative bodies and repressing the media. We use an original-panel dataset of 144 countries in 1990–2007 to test our argument. We find that, on average, high-quality election monitoring has a measurably negative effect on the rule of law, administrative performance, and media freedom. We employ various strategies to guard against endogeneity, including instrumenting for election monitoring.
A stochastic analysis of alternate ways of scheduling transport for tourists

A firm providing transport to tourists can do so at fixed points in time (scheduling by time). Alternately, it can wait for a certain minimal number of tourists to arrive before it provides transport (scheduling by numbers). This “how to schedule” problem confronts all providers of transport to tourists. Yet, this problem has received scant theoretical attention in the literature. Hence, we conduct a stochastic analysis of this problem in our paper. We first describe a model that accounts for the common features of sightseeing trips to a particular tourist attraction. Second, we analyze the provision of transport when our firm schedules by time. Third, we study the provision of transport when our firm schedules by numbers. Fourth, we discuss the implications of our findings. Finally, we conclude and then make suggestions for extending the analysis in this paper.
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS AND GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: COMPLEMENTS FOR SUSTAINABILITY?

Some researchers question the legitimacy of EMSs since organizations can claim to have one when in fact they make no attempt to reduce their environmental harm. In instances where EMSs enhance an organization's environmental performance, critics argue that improvements are likely to occur within the organization's operational boundaries rather than being extended throughout the supply chain. However, previous research suggests that the organizational capabilities required to adopt an EMS may facilitate GSCM implementation and the institutional pressures to adopt both management practices are similar. Consequently, EMS adopters may have a greater propensity to expand their focus beyond their organizational boundaries and utilize GSCM practices to minimize system-wide environmental impacts. This research illuminates the debate by empirically evaluating the relationship between EMS and GSCM practices. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Dynamic Pricing with Financial Milestones: Feedback-Form Policies

We study a seller that starts with an initial inventory of goods, has a target horizon over which to sell the goods, and is subject to a set of financial milestone constraints on the revenues and sales that need to be achieved at different time points along the sales horizon. We characterize the revenue maximizing dynamic pricing policy for the seller and highlight the effect of revenue and sales milestones on its structure. The optimal policy can be written in feedback form, where the price at each point in time is selected so as to track the most stringent among all future milestones. Building on that observation, we propose a discrete-review policy that aims to dynamically track the appropriate milestone constraint and show that this simple and practical policy is near optimal in settings with large initial capacity and long sales horizons even in settings with no advance demand model information. One motivating application comes from the sales of new multiunit, residential real estate developments, where intermediate milestone constraints play an important role in their financing and construction. This paper was accepted by Gerard P. Cachon, stochastic models and simulation.
Mixed Signals and Subtle Cues: Jury Independence and Judicial Appointment of the Jury Foreperson

In many jurisdictions across the United States, both state and federal, it appears to be common practice for the trial judge in a criminal case to appoint the foreperson of the jury in a non-random fashion. Unlike the much more traditional practice of allowing the jury to elect its own foreperson, judicial appointment of the foreperson is fraught with a variety of serious infirmities, many of them of constitutional magnitude. A substantial body of case law and literature - as well as common sense - tells us that anything that a trial judge says or does during a trial is likely to be perceived by all of the trial participants, including the jurors, as a reflection of the judge's personal views and opinions. The mere fact that the judge has appointed a particular juror to be foreperson has the potential to convey all sorts of messages to the remaining jurors and to the other trial participants, including that the judge thinks that this juror's judgment is superior to that of other jurors or that this juror's views are in accord with those of the judge. Beyond that set of problems is the issue of whether the trial judge, by appointing the foreperson, who in turn largely controls the dynamics of the jury deliberation process, has invaded the jury's right to choose its own leader and its own deliberation dynamics, thereby influencing the results. This article discusses the pervasiveness of judicial appointment of the foreperson, some of the apparent justifications for the practice, and the legal argument that the judicial appointment of the foreperson violates the defendant's right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury.
Financial reporting in the 1930s in the United States preserving the status quo

Abstract I use historical analysis to examine the effect of securities regulation onfinancial reporting relationships in the 1930s, Adopting Edelman's (1964)framework, I posit that the financial reporting provisions of securities reg-ulation were 'symbolic,' i.e., not expected to be implemented, and there-fore that passage of regulation did not change financial reportingrelationships. I examine the correspondence between the American Insti-tute of Accountants (AIA) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), theMinutes of the AIA, and other primary sources to determine the impactof regulation. The historical record shows that the financial reportingobjectives (uniform accounting and limitirig management's accountingchoices) of securities regulation were not implemented during the 1930s.I conclude that regulation did not improve the quality of data provided toinvestors and that empirical studies that use the pre/post SEC periodiza-tion model are not well structured. I also suggest that future historicalresearchers might adopt a more critical lens, such as Gramsci's corporatehegemony model, to see how passage of legislation masked the continueddominance of the securities markets by a privileged elite and divertedattention from more material questions.For all the complexity of its enabling legislation, the power of the SECresided principally in just two provisions, both of them ingeniouslysimple. The first mandated detailed information, such as balancesheets, profit and loss statements, and the names and compensation ofcorporate officers, about firms whose securities were publicly traded.The second required verification of that information by independentauditors using standardized accounting procedures. At a stroke, thosemeasures ended the monopoly of the Morgans and their like on invest-ment information. Wall Street was now saturated with data that wererelevant, accessible, and comparable across firms and transactions. TheSEC's regulations unarguably imposed new reporting requirements onbusinesses. They also gave a huge boost to the status of the account-ing profession. (Kennedy, 1999: 368)Address for Correspondence: Barbara D. Merino, Horace Brock Professor ofAccounting University of North Texas
Does home equity explain the black wealth gap

Prior literature has shown that blacks have lower rates of homeownership, lower amounts of home equity, and experience lower housing appreciation than whites. This paper examines racial differences in the returns to homeownership using a longitudinal survey of middle-aged homeowners. We find that home equity appreciation is much lower for blacks between 1994 and 2004, however blacks with high incomes do not experience the same home equity gap. While there are regional differences in negative racial effects, high income blacks are able to avoid those as well. We find that among those who acquire the largest increase in home equity, being black is not detrimental. We also find that even when we account for differences in home equity growth, racial differences in wealth growth persist.
Poverty Traps and Index-Based Risk Transfer Products

Summary. — A growing literature suggests that in low-income countries, households with few assets can be trapped in chronic poverty. This article reviews relevant threads of the poverty traps literature to motivate a description of the opportunities presented by innovative index-based risk transfer products. These products can be used to address some insurance and credit market failures that contribute to the persistence of poverty among households in low-income countries. Applications are considered at the micro, meso, and macro levels. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Excitonic density wave and spin-valley superfluid in bilayer transition metal dichalcogenide.

Artificial moire superlattices in 2d van der Waals heterostructures are a new venue for realizing and controlling correlated electronic phenomena. Recently, twisted bilayer WSe2 emerged as a new robust moire system hosting a correlated insulator at moire half-filling over a range of twist angle. In this work, we present a theory of this insulating state as an excitonic density wave due to intervalley electron–hole pairing. We show that exciton condensation is strongly enhanced by a van Hove singularity near the Fermi level. Our theory explains the remarkable sensitivity of the insulating gap to the vertical electric field. In contrast, the gap is weakly reduced by a perpendicular magnetic field, with quadratic dependence at low field. The different responses to electric and magnetic field can be understood in terms of pair-breaking versus non-pair-breaking effects in a BCS analog of the system. We further predict superfluid spin transport in this electrical insulator, which can be detected by optical spin injection and spatial-temporal imaging. A correlated insulator has recently been observed in twisted bilayer WSe2 moire superlattices. Here, Bi and Fu present a theory and predict the insulating state to be an excitonic density wave as well as a spin-valley superfluid, which can be tested by optical pump-probe experiments.
Is the Name Property? Comparing the English and the French Evolution

With the use of multiple sources, the author questions the distinction between persons and things and its relative concepts of property and personality, through one example, that of the name. The author analyses the affirmation in French and English laws that the name is not property, but, for French law at least, a personality right. The use of multiple historical sources (notably the English case of Du Boulay v. Du Boulay, and the French cases in the 19th century) as well as of contemporary works enable the author to trace the origin of the affirmation and what it entailed and still entails. Ultimately, comparing the evolution of English law and French law, the author concludes that "[t]he debate about the nature of the name is not on whether the name is property or not, but on what the relationship should be between a person and his name," with at its heart the concepts of property and personality.
The price of judicial economy in the US

In the US, courts widely perceive that judicial scarcity is a common problem threatening the fair and timely resolution of disputes. Courts cite the attendant interest in judicial economy to justif...
Do tying, bundling, and other purchase restraints increase product quality?

Abstract Tying, bundling, minimum purchase requirements, loyalty discounts, exclusive dealing, and other purchase restraints can create stronger incentives for firms to invest in product quality. In our first example, the firm sells a durable experience good and a complementary non-durable good to a representative consumer. Tying shifts profits from the durable to the non-durable good, making profits more sensitive to the consumer's experience. In our second example, the firm sells a single experience good to consumers with heterogeneous demands. Minimum purchase requirements screen out the low-volume consumers who would otherwise free ride on the superior monitoring of the high-volume consumers. The examples illustrate that purchase restraints can increase both firm profits and consumer surplus by making firm profits more sensitive to consumer experience, either directly by giving the consumer more control over the stream of profits or indirectly by constraining consumers to monitor more intensively.
IMPERFECT ALTERNATIVES: NETWORKS, SALIENCE, AND INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN IN FINANCIAL CRISES

With the benefit of hindsight — and some aspiration to foresight — it is useful to consider the type of regulatory regime that might best address financial crises. What could policymakers have done to prevent the recent crisis? And once the crisis started, what interventions might have alleviated it? These questions have been widely debated, with an eye to both substantive policy and the design of effective regulatory institutions. This Article speaks to the latter project — one of comparative institutional analysis — though with a framework that implicates our substantive policy choices as well. It begins with an account of financial crises as grounded in the multiple equilibrium character of the financial markets. Given the latter, it suggests, questions of “salience” become central to the design of both substantive policy and relevant institutions. To emphasize as much, the Article considers the role of transnational regulatory networks in preventing and responding to financial crises. Drawing on the example of the recently re-formed Financial Stability Board, it highlights certain inherent limits of networks, but also points to institutional reforms that might be expected to enhance their capacity to impact salience — and thereby play a role — in regulating financial crises.
Entrepreneurship: : catallactic and constitutional perspectives

The most important distinction between Virginia political economy (VPE) and the other branches of public choice scholarship is a close affinity of the former to Austrian economics. Contributions in both the Virginia and the Vienna (Austrian) traditions have emphasized this connection and highlighted the analytical and ideological interdependencies of the two schools. This paper argues that an application of the Austrian theory of political entrepreneurship to the VPE framework can provide important insights regarding the direction of political change. Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship explains that coordination of individual action is possible where price signals provide information. When price signals are absent the entrepreneurial process breaks down. There is common ground between Kirznerian entrepreneurship and Buchanan’s creative action. Scholars at the intersection of the Virginia and the Vienna traditions can use this common ground to make pattern predictions regarding the direction of political change.
Retaliatory Employment Arbitration

Employer actions to resolve disputes with employees by requiring an agreement to arbitrate as a condition of employment has continued to increase at a rapid pace over the last twenty years. The Supreme Court’s wholesale endorsement of these arbitration agreements under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) as a process to resolve statutory employment claims has left employees with very few legal challenges to this so-called "forced" or "mandatory" arbitration. The only significant Supreme Court case to rebuff the employer’s attempt to compel arbitration of a statutory employment dispute, EEOC v. Waffle House, occurred in 2002. In Waffle House, the Court emphasized the importance of the EEOC as an administrative agency charged with enforcing Title VII and acknowledged the significance of allowing the EEOC to pursue court actions to vindicate the public interest in eradicating employment discrimination despite the presence of an agreement to arbitrate between the employee and the employer. From reviewing lower court decisions since Waffle House, this paper identifies a number of cases where employers acted to compel arbitration while a charge was still pending with the EEOC. This paper explains how these employer actions to compel arbitration attempted to circumvent the Supreme Court’s holding in Waffle House by trying to force employees into a final arbitration decision that could operate as res judicata and a complete bar to recovery in any later court action that the EEOC might pursue. The paper also asserts that these efforts to compel arbitration while an EEOC charge is still pending establish a viable claim for retaliation that an employee may pursue under Title VII. When an unfair labor practice charge is still pending with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), employer attempts to compel arbitration also operate as illegal retaliation under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Retaliatory employment arbitration occurs whenever an employer attempts to force arbitration as a response to an employee’s agency charge while the matter charged is still pending with that agency. The action to compel arbitration would deter a reasonable employee from filing a charge with the EEOC if the employee knows that an immediate result from having filed the charge will be an attempt to compel arbitration and prevent the employee from receiving any of the benefits of having the EEOC pursue the matter. Likewise, when an employee files an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB, an employer’s attempt to compel arbitration creates a chilling effect that dissuades employees from filing charges as a form of retaliation under the NLRA.The paper examines and defines the parameters of retaliatory employment arbitration as it reveals one of the few claims that employees may still have left to challenge forced or mandatory arbitration agreements.
Functional Neuroimaging and the Law: Trends and Directions for Future Scholarship

Under the umbrella of the burgeoning neurotransdisciplines, scholars are using the principles and research methodologies of their primary and secondary fields to examine developments in neuroimaging, neuromodulation and psychopharmacology. The path for advanced scholarship at the intersection of law and neuroscience may clear if work across the disciplines is collected and reviewed and outstanding and debated issues are identified and clarified. In this article, I organize, examine and refine a narrow class of the burgeoning neurotransdiscipline scholarship; that is, scholarship at the interface of law and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
"THE MERCEDES DIVIDE?"—AMERICAN SEGREGATION SHAPES THE COLOR OF ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

This article highlights the Digital Divide in Internet and broadband access that exists between and among African Americans and Latinos and whites. Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell mockingly called this disparity a Mercedes Divide. He said that he would like to have one but he can't afford it. Powell's comments were particularly contrary to federal government and Pew Internet Study reports of the 1990s that found race to be a salient factor in the disparity of access. This article points out that the Divide is exacerbated by a number of socio-economic factors affecting the minority community, such as high rates of poverty, segregation, bad schools, and biased law enforcement policies placing a large percentage of African American men behind bars. This Divide is a detriment to consumers and minority-owned businesses. Minority consumers will be less likely to obtain competitive prices by checking out a variety of vendor's offerings by pointing and clicking a mouse. Likewise minority-owned businesses without access to broadband services will be unable to benefit from access to more vendors allowing the minority-owned businesses to achieve more competitive prices for their inputs. Moreover, given the lack of broadband access in minority communities, the minority-owned businesses will be less likely to increase their pool of customers. In examining this persistent divide, the article also highlights the federal government's misleading reporting of demographic differences in access that now make it much harder to track the Divide. This misleading reporting makes it now more difficult to fix the disparity.
Market microstructure: A survey

Market microstructure studies the process by which investors’ latent demands are ultimately translated into prices and volumes. This paper reviews the theoretical, empirical and experimental literature on market microstructure relating to: (1) price formation, including the dynamic process by which prices come to impound information, (2) market structure and design, including the relation between price formation and trading protocols, (3) Transparency, the ability of market participants to observe information about the trading process, and (4) Applications to other areas of xnance including asset pricing, international "nance, and corporate "nance. ( 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Development of a high throughput cloud-based data pipeline for 21 cm cosmology

Abstract We present a case study of a cloud-based computational workflow for processing large astronomical data sets from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) cosmology experiment. Cloud computing is well-suited to large-scale, episodic computation because it offers extreme scalability in a pay-for-use model. This facilitates fast turnaround times for testing computationally expensive analysis techniques. We describe how we have used the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform to efficiently and economically test and implement our data analysis pipeline. We discuss the challenges of working with the AWS spot market, which reduces costs at the expense of longer processing turnaround times, and we explore this tradeoff with a Monte Carlo simulation.
Calorie reductions and within‐meal calorie compensation in children's meal combos

Objective What happens if a fast-food restaurant chain lowers the calories in a children's meal bundle (CMB), mainly by reducing the portion size of French fries? This study examines how such changes may influence within-meal selections. Specifically, do lower-calorie changes lead to within-meal calorie compensation? Methods Item-level anonymous transaction data were collected for thirty chain-owned representative US restaurants during June, July, and August of 2011 (pre-changes) and 2012 (post-changes) with a focus on transaction records that included a CMB. Mixed-effects, repeated measures estimation techniques were used for the analysis. Outcome measures were the percentage and caloric profile of specific entree items, side items, and beverages purchased in all children selecting meals. Results The new CMB resulted in selected children's meals that had an average of 18.8% fewer calories (P < 0.001). Additionally, a greater percentage of meals had milk (P < 0.001) compared to the prior year. Conclusion Small changes in the automatic—or default—foods offered or promoted in children's meals can reduce calorie intake and improve the overall nutrition from selected foods as long as there is still an indulgence. Importantly, balancing a meal with smaller portions of favored foods might avoid reactance and overeating. Just as managers have done this in restaurants, parents can do this at home.
Predicting Restatements in Macroeconomic Indicators using Accounting Information

ABSTRACT: Earnings growth dispersion contains information about trends in labor reallocation, unemployment change, and, ultimately, aggregate output. We find that initial macroeconomic estimates released by government statistical agencies do not fully incorporate this information. As a consequence, earnings growth dispersion predicts future restatements in nominal and real GDP growth (and unemployment change) both in the in-sample and out-of-sample tests. Further, when we adjust GDP estimates using the out-of-sample restatement predictions, we find statistically and economically significant effects for the monetary policy prescriptions (Taylor rule) and banking regulation (Basel III).
Modeling Levels and Time in Entrepreneurship Research: An Illustration With Growth Strategies and Post-IPO Performance

New ventures lack resources, are buffeted by environmental factors, and often experience rapid growth and organizational transformations that can have profound effects on performance and survival. ...
Debt and creative destruction: Why could subsidizing corporate debt be optimal?

The existing theoretical literature provides little justification for a corporate debt subsidy. We illustrate the welfare benefit of this subsidy and study how the social costs and benefits change with the duration of industry distress. In our model, two firms engage in socially wasteful competition for survival in a declining industry. Firms differ on two dimensions: exogenous productivity and endogenously chosen amount of debt financing, resulting in a two-dimensional war of attrition. Debt financing increases incentives to exit, which, although costly for the firm, is socially beneficial. These benefits decline as industry distress shortens. Our normative model sheds light on why the debt tax subsidy still persists around the world. Analogously, the model can also rationalize a seemingly ad hoc feature of the U.S. tax system, which subsidizes the conflict of interest between debt and equity regarding firm liquidation. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.
Optimal contracts with privately informed agents and active principals

Abstract This paper considers an optimal contracting problem between an informed risk-averse agent and a principal, when the agent needs to perform multiple tasks, and the principal is active, namely she can influence some aspect of the agency relationship on top of the contract itself (i.e. capital budgets, task assignments). The paper shows how asymmetric information makes incentives and investment decisions substitutes for the principal. This result yields novel implications for contracting models with moral hazard and asymmetric information, i.e., capital budgeting or external capital raising games.
Green With Envy? Greenmail Is Good! Rational Economic Responses to Greenmail in a Competitive Market for Capital and Managers

"Greenmail" denotes the decision by a corporation's board of directors to repurchase its shares that are held by a corporate raider, often at a significant premium, thereby keeping the board of directors in office. It may represent a conflict of interest between the corporation's shareholders and the board of directors. While greenmail is legal, 50% of greenmail gains are subject to taxation. This Article argues that greenmail has a healthy role in a competitive market economy.
Do CEO Succession and Succession Planning Affect Stakeholders' Perceptions of Financial Reporting Risk? Evidence from Audit Fees

ABSTRACT: In this paper, we examine how CEO succession and succession planning affect perceptions of financial reporting risk among stakeholders who are responsible for and oversee firms' financial reporting (e.g., auditors, management, and audit committees). Management succession introduces uncertainty about firms' future operations, financial policies, and potential motivation for earnings management, which we predict elevates the perceived risk of financial reporting improprieties. Consistent with this prediction, we find that audit fees are higher for firms with new CEOs. Importantly, however, we note that careful CEO succession planning (i.e., promoting an “heir apparent”) attenuates perceptions of higher risk, as evidenced by a lack of an audit pricing adjustment. These results are robust to several alternative specifications and analyses designed to mitigate the concern that the association between audit fees and CEO succession and succession planning is driven by factors leading to the CEO change...
The World Income Distribution

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and techno-logical spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns: countries that accumulate capital faster than average experience declining export prices, depressing the rate of return to capital and discouraging further accumulation. Because of constant re-turns to capital accumulation from a global perspective time-series behavior of the world economy is similar to that of existing endogenous growth models, with the world growth rate determined by policies, savings and technologies. Because of diminishing returns to capital accumulation at the country level, the cross-sectional behavior of the world economy is similar to that of existing exogenous growth models: cross-country variation in economic policies, savings and technology translate into cross-country variation in incomes, and country dynamics exhibit conditional convergence as in the Solow-Ramsey model. The dispersion of the world income distribution is determined by the forces that shape the strength of the terms of trade effects the degree of openness to international trade and the extent of specialization. Finally, we provide evidence that countries accumulating faster experience a worsening in their terms of trade. Our estimates imply that, all else equal, a 1 percentage point faster growth is associated with approximately a 0.7 percentage point decline in the terms of trade.
The inevitable legal pluralism within universal harmonization regimes: the case of the CISG

Faced with a world of multiple overlapping normative communities and jurisdictions, law often seeks universal rules and harmonization regimes. Such rules and regimes offer to tame pluralism through the imposition of common codes of conduct. The 1980 Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) is a useful example of this phenomenon. Arising from harmonization efforts dating back at least to the 1920s, the CISG purports to solve the problem of jurisdictional overlap and inconsistency in the application of domestic law to cross-border commercial transactions. To its backers, the CISG addresses intractable problems of legal uncertainty and forum shopping, creating a stable global law of trade. Thus, the CISG resolutely seeks uniformity, and those most committed to the treaty and its implementation tend to see any inconsistency in application as a problem to be solved rather than a necessary feature of how even a harmonization regime must operate in a multivariate word. This brief article takes the opposite approach, suggesting some ways in which legal pluralism inevitably creeps into the CISG regime, and treating such areas of pluralism as a reality that will never (and perhaps should never) disappear completely.
The bug at Volkswagen: Lessons in co-determination, ownership, and board structure

Although the primary cause of the emissions scandal at Volkswagen appears to have been misfeasance and malfeasance on a corporate-wide scale, we argue that such a problematic culture existed at Volkswagen because of the composition of the board itself in combination with the unique governance structure known as “co-determination,” that defines many German companies, including VW. There are three major problems from a corporate governance standpoint with the Volkswagen board. First, is the interest-conflicting nature of the dual-class stock held by the dominant shareholding Porsche and Piech families. Second, is the presence of a government as a major shareholder. And third is the organization of its characteristically German “two-tier” board around the principle of co-determination, which mandated significant labor representation. We argue that each of these elements of the VW ownership and governance structure contributed in varying degrees to the board failure of oversight that led to the management decision to evade emissions regulations.