cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Tollbooths and Newsstands on the Information Superhighway

The Internet has made it easier than ever before to stay informed on current events — and without ever needing to pick up, let alone pay for, a newspaper. But recent litigation and legislation in the United States and Europe have challenged the cost-free flow of such information. The opposition to these recent legal developments is rooted in a belief that stronger intellectual property protections result in higher tolls, which, in turn, price many consumers out of accessing and using the information. But overlooked has been an existential consideration: information-gathering is expensive, and absent efficient tolls there will be far less information to access at all, regardless of cost. The United States Supreme Court recognized this principle in Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises as it applies more narrowly to whether copyright law inhibits free expression. Identifying the particular importance of incentives for newsgatherers, this Essay extends the Harper & Row rationale beyond its copyright mooring. In light of the continued withering corps of professional newsgatherers, these legal developments actually could enhance the exchange of information and ideas to the extent they preserve incentives for news publishers. This Essay proffers that copyright expansions actually can increase access and thereby serve important copyright and First Amendment values.
COALITION GOVERNMENTS AND SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISES

This article examines the domestic politics of sovereign debt crises. I focus on two alternative mechanisms that aggregate the preferences of domestic actors over debt repayment: single-party versus multiparty coalition governments. I uncover a very strong empirical regularity using cross-national data from 48 developing countries between 1971 and 1997. Countries that are governed by a coalition of parties are less likely to reschedule their debts than those under single-party governments. The effect of multiparty coalitions on sovereign defaults is quantitatively large and roughly of the same order of magnitude as liquidity factors such as debt burden and debt service. These results are robust to numerous specifications and samples.
Small is the New Biglaw: Some Thoughts on Technology, Economics, and the Practice of Law

These are not happy times for either the practice or the teaching of law. On the practice side, law firms are folding and laying off lawyers in unprecedented numbers, while on the teaching side, many of us wonder whether the current model of legal education is adequate to the twentyfirst century. And there is reason for concern on both fronts. In this Idea, I will look at some general changes in technology and economics over the past few years—changes that have to a significant degree undermined the position of large, integrated concerns dealing in information and information-related services. I will then discuss how these changes relate to the legal profession, and in particular the largefirm sector, and what that means for legal education and for those pursuing a career in the law.
‘Small-Town Defenders’: The Production of Citizenship and Belonging in Hazleton, Pennsylvania:

Over the past five years an aggressive movement has emerged to return immigration enforcement powers to the local level in the US, and to some extent in Europe as well. Hazleton, PA, was home to the first local government in the US to pass an ‘Illegal Immigration Relief Act’ (IIRA), which subsequently became a model for other cities across the country seeking to implement their own immigration regulations. We argue that Hazleton's IIRA was as much productive of tensions over migration as it was the product of them. Neoliberal economic restructuring left Hazleton residents feeling a sense of ‘class downgrading’ but the ordinance itself was central in creating divisions between the native-born white population and recent Latino arrivals. As much as the ordinance served to exclude undocumented immigrants, it simultaneously served to unify native-born white residents by repositioning Hazleton as ‘small-town USA’, no longer marginal but, instead, central to the defense of American ‘quality of life’. Control ov...
Coincident and leading indicators of the stock market

Abstract In this paper we have two goals: first, we want to represent monthly stock market fluctuations by constructing a non-linear coincident financial indicator. The indicator is constructed as an unobservable factor whose first moment and conditional volatility are driven by a two-state Markov variable. It can be interpreted as the investors' real-time belief about the state of financial conditions. Second, we want to explore an approach in which investors may use their perceptions of the state of the economy to form forecasts of financial market conditions and possibly of excess returns. To investigate this, we build leading indicators as forecasts of the estimated coincident financial index. The leading indicators yield better within and out-of-sample performance in forecasting, not only the state of the stock market but also of excess stock returns, as compared with the performance obtained using linear methods that have been proposed in the existing literature.
Following the Money--The Chaotic Kerfuffle When Insurance Proceeds Simultaneously are the Only Rebuild Funds and the Only Mortgage Collateral

One of the recurring and yet repetitively unanticipated challenges is the tug of war between homeowners and their mortgage lender/mortgage service over money. A standard condition of mortgages in the United States is that the borrower must have casualty insurance protecting not just the borrower, but also the bank. When the necessity arises to rebuild the home, the same pot of money - the insurance proceeds - is what the homeowner needs to pay a contractor and what the bank needs to protect its loan until the house is rebuilt. This article sorts out the legal validity to each party’s position. The issues reduce to six questions: 1. Does the bank have rights in all insurance proceeds, just the proceeds insuring the house itself (as opposed to other commonly insured losses, such as the personal belongings in the house or landscaping and other structures external to the house), or something in-between? 2. To what extent does the bank have rights in insurance proceeds if the balance of those funds exceeds the current outstanding principal balance of the mortgage. Does the bank’s rights extend to the overage? 3. As to the funds the bank has rights in, is there a choice available between using the money to rebuild or to pay off/pay down the mortgage, and if there is a choice, does the bank or the homeowner hold the choice? 4. During the time the bank holds whatever money the bank gets to hold, does the money accumulate interest for the benefit of the homeowner? 5. To the extent the money is being used to fund a rebuild, at what interim junctures, if any, must the bank partially release funds? 6. What happens if the bank, while holding the funds, becomes insolvent? This article ends with a proposal to rewrite the standard mortgage covenants to more rationally address these issues.
The International Law of Financial Crisis: Spillovers, Subsidiarity, Fragmentation and Cooperation

This article develops an analytical template for examining possible mechanisms for the avoidance and management of international financial crisis, focusing on certain areas of prudential financial regulation. This template examines questions of national regulatory policy reform, reasons for international cooperation and problems of cross-functional fragmentation. There is no evidence yet of beneficial regulatory competition in the case of this crisis. Shareholders and creditors do not seem systematically to have identified regulatory inadequacies, and migrated to stronger regulatory environments. So, competition-based discipline on lax regulation seems not to have worked. In order for each state to reduce risk through regulatory reform, states must work together to avoid cross-border harm that is not fully taken into account in national decision-making, and to avoid detrimental regulatory competition. They must work together to make rules, but they must recognize that our vision of the future is limited, and so they must establish institutions that will allow them to revise rules and institutions, as necessitated by unfolding change. Oxford University Press 2010, all rights reserved, Oxford University Press.
Fixing Unfair Contracts

Various doctrines of contract and consumer protection law allow courts to strike down unfair contract terms. A large literature has explored the question which terms should be viewed as unfair, but a related question has never been studied systematically – what provision should replace the vacated unfair term? How should a distributively unfair contract be fixed? This Article demonstrates that the law uses three competing criteria for a replacement provision: (1) the most reasonable term; (2) a punitive term, strongly unfavorable to the overreaching party; and (3) the minimally tolerable term, which preserves the original term as much as is tolerable. The Article explores in depth the third criterion – the minimally tolerable term – under which the smallest intervention that is necessary is applied. This criterion, which has received no prior scholarly notice, is surprisingly prevalent in legal doctrine. The Article surveys its ubiquity and explores its conceptual and normative underpinnings.
Convergence and Its Discontents: A Reconsideration of the Merits of Convergence of Global Competition Law

Abstract This Article examines the recent phenomenon of the convergence of competition law regimes across the globe. The increasing harmonization of competition law, at both the procedural and substantive levels, has been widely discussed and applauded in recent years. This Article casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that convergence necessarily constitutes a positive development in global competition law. After analysing the causes of the phenomenon, this Article argues that there should be limits to the pursuit of convergence. First, the costs of convergence should not be overlooked. The most important of such costs is the loss of national regulatory prerogative. Second, the multitude of goals that are pursued by different jurisdictions in their competition laws poses serious obstacles to convergence. Finally, the need to incorporate economic development considerations and cultural variations in market behavior further cautions against wholesale harmonization of competition laws. Table of Contents I. Introduction 434 II. Proliferation of Competition Law and the Drive for Convergence ....436 III. A Closer Look at Convergence 438 A. Different Levels of Convergence 438 B. The Mechanisms for Convergence...... 441 C. Effectiveness of Convergence as a Harmonization Strategy 450 IV. The Costs and Benefits of Convergence.... 453 A. Globalization and Convergence 454 B. A Proposed Analytical Framework ....457 C. Harmonization and National Regulatory Prerogative 462 D. Application of the Proposed Framework to Competition Law.. 463 V. Divergent Understanding of the Goals of Competition Law .....465 A. Different Conceptions of Competition 466 B. Consumer Welfare Versus Total Welfare 470 C. Competition Law as Technocratic Regulation 473 D. Implications for Convergence 475 VI. Developmental Considerations and Convergence 476 A. Special Characteristics of Developing Economies ..477 B. Implications for Convergence 481 VII. Cultural Variations and Convergence 484 A. Cultural Norms and Competition 484 B. Implications for Substantive Convergence .....485 C. Cultures and the Pursuit of Normative Convergence 487 VIII. Conclusion 489 I. INTRODUCTION If there is one most important development in international competition law in recent years, it is convergence. With the proliferation of competition law regimes in the last three decades, there has been increasing concern about inconsistent enforcement and consequently a drive to harmonize competition law globally. …
The Morning After: Explaining the Slowdown in Japanese Growth in the 1990s

Abstract This paper uses a VAR to investigate four possible explanations of the extended slump in Japanese economic activity over the 1990s: the absence of bold and consistent fiscal stimulus; the limited room for expansionary monetary policy due to a liquidity trap; overinvestment and debt overhang; and disruption of financial intermediation. The results indicate that all of these factors played a role, but that the major explanation is disruption in financial intermediation, largely operating through the impact of changes in domestic asset prices on bank lending.
Useful relations among the generators in the defining and adjoint representations of SU(N)

There are numerous relations among the generators in the defining and adjoint representations of SU(N). These include Casimir operators, formulae for traces of products of generators, etc. Due to the existence of the completely symmetric tensor $d_{abc}$ that arises in the study of the SU(N) Lie algebra, one can also consider relations that involve the adjoint representation matrix, $(D^a)_{bc}=d_{abc}$. In this review, we summarize many useful relations satisfied by the defining and adjoint representation matrices of SU(N). A few relations special to the case of N=3 are highlighted.
THE MORPHOLOGY OF PRICE DISPERSION

This paper is a study of the shape and structure of the distribution of prices at which an identical good is sold in a given market and time period. We find that the typical price distribution is symmetric and leptokurtic, with a standard deviation between 19% and 36% . Only 10% of the variance of prices is due to variation in the expensiveness of the stores at which a good is sold, while the remaining 90% is due, in approximately equal parts, to differences in the average price of a good across equally expensive stores and to differences in the price of a good across transactions at the same store. We show that the distribution of prices that households pay for the same bundle of goods is approximately Normal, with a standard deviation between 9% and 14% . Half of this dispersion is due to differences in the expensiveness of the stores where households shop, while the other half is mostly due to differences in householdsâ choices of which goods to purchase at which stores. We find that households with fewer employed members pay lower prices, and do so by visiting a larger number of stores, rather than by shopping more frequently.
The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Current Crisis

In the past year, a rising tide of antagonism to the New Deal has formed among some economists and writers, claiming that the New Deal policies made the Great Depression worse. Is there any basis in fact to New Deal denialism? The noted economic historian Alexander Field has closely studied the period. He shows the central weaknesses of these arguments and makes a strong case that the New Deal made a remarkable contribution to the U.S. economy and the American way of life.
Consenting to a Child's Decision to Join a Jihad: Insights from a Survey of Militant Families in Pakistan

This study examines the factors that lead household members to give or refuse consent for other household members to become a militant (or mujahid). Using data derived from a detailed survey fielded among a convenience sample of 141 families of slain militants in Pakistan, this manuscript seeks to explain why some families support participation in jihad and why some families do not. Using the extant literature on recruitment, participation in violent political conflict, and militant Islam as a guide, we posit how and why various household attributes should affect a household member to grant or refuse permission for another household member to wage jihad. We then test our hypotheses implied by our argument using data on households' financial, religious, and social characteristics. We conclude that a number of social, economic, and religious factors account for variation in household members' support of jihad.
Bitcoin and Money Laundering: Mining for an Effective Solution

Technology forges ahead at a rapid pace, whether we like it or not. Criminals recognize this inevitability and use technological improvements to advance their craft, committing crimes from half a world away in real time. Meticulous criminals also use technological advancements to distance themselves from their illegal activities and profits through use of virtual banking and electronic money transfer systems, which allow criminals to buy, sell, and exchange goods without any physical interaction. Though such services use digital logs that serve to identify a sender and a receiver’s digital identities, criminals possess the means to obfuscate their digital identity by simply spoofing their Internet Protocol address or by using another individual’s account, essentially making their activities untraceable. New virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, add yet another layer of anonymity by allowing users to transfer value without the collection of any personally identifiable information. Regulations often fail to affect such virtual currencies due to lack of foresight by the regulation writers, creating a legal gray area. Thus, criminals can continue to capitalize on technological innovation to bolster their illegal activities. Money laundering is one particular criminal craft that stands to benefit from technological advancement. This Note analyzes the effects of Bitcoin and analogous virtual currencies on anti–money laundering (AML) enforcement. Part I gives a brief primer on money laundering and virtual currencies. Part II offers a Bitcoin primer, which differentiates Bitcoin technology from traditional currencies and competing virtual currencies. Part III analyzes whether Bitcoin is legal to use or trade in the United States, using domestic and international adoption of Bitcoin for guidance. Part IV discusses whether current U.S. AML regulatory schemes encompass the entirety of Bitcoin use, finding that it does not. Finally, Part V offers suggestions for a regulatory scheme encompassing Bitcoin and analogous virtual currency technologies. Ultimately, this Note recommends regulating Bitcoin currency exchanges under existing AML regulation schemes instead of broadening statutory definitions to control all aspects of Bitcoin or analogous virtual currencies.
Euler equation errors

Abstract The standard, representative agent, consumption-based asset pricing theory based on CRRA utility fails to explain the average returns of risky assets. When evaluated on cross-sections of stock returns, the model generates economically large unconditional Euler equation errors. Unlike the equity premium puzzle, these large Euler equation errors cannot be resolved with high values of risk aversion. To explain why the standard model fails, we need to develop alternative models that can rationalize its large pricing errors. We evaluate whether four newer theories at the vanguard of consumption-based asset pricing can explain the large Euler equation errors of the standard consumption-based model. In each case, we find that the alternative theory counterfactually implies that the standard model has negligible Euler equation errors. We show that the models miss on this dimension because they mischaracterize the joint behavior of consumption and asset returns in recessions, when aggregate consumption is falling. By contrast, a simple model in which aggregate consumption growth and stockholder consumption growth are highly correlated most of the time, but have low or negative correlation in severe recessions, produces violations of the standard model's Euler equations and departures from joint lognormality that are remarkably similar to those found in the data.
Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in China

Abstract We investigate executive compensation and corporate governance in China's publicly traded firms. We also compare executive pay in China to the USA. Consistent with agency theory, we find that executive compensation is positively correlated to firm performance. The study shows that executive pay and CEO incentives are lower in State controlled firms and firms with concentrated ownership structures. Boardroom governance is important. We find that firms with more independent directors on the board have a higher pay-for-performance link. Non-State (private) controlled firms and firms with more independent directors on the board are more likely to replace the CEO for poor performance. Finally, we document that US executive pay (salary and bonus) is about seventeen times higher than in China. Significant differences in US–China pay persist even after controlling for economic and governance factors.
A modular framework for early-phase seamless oncology trials:

Background:As our understanding of the etiology and mechanisms of cancer becomes more sophisticated and the number of therapeutic options increases, phase I oncology trials today have multiple prim...
Regulating the Mutual Fund Industry

With virtually every other household in the United States invested in mutual funds, effective and efficient regulation of the mutual fund industry must be a top national priority. But the creation of a new private regulator - whether along the lines of SROs such as the NASD and NYSE or the recently created PCAOB - would be a step in the wrong direction. Instead, much more can be gained from strengthening the SEC's longstanding role as the principal overseer of mutual funds and improving other aspects of the existing regulatory regime.
Production Networks and Stock Returns: The Role of Vertical Creative Destruction

We examine empirically and theoretically the relation between firms’ risk and distance to consumers in a production network. We document two novel facts: firms farther away from consumers have higher risk premiums and higher exposure to aggregate productivity. We quantitatively explain these findings using a general equilibrium model featuring a multilayer production process. The economic force is “vertical creative destruction,” that is, positive productivity shocks to suppliers devalue customers’ assets-in-place, thereby lowering the cyclicality of downstream firms’ values. We show that vertical creative destruction varies with competition and firm characteristics and generates sizable cross-sectional differences in risk premiums.
Fiscal Shenanigans, Targeted Federal Health Care Funds, and Patient Mortality

The federal government spends billions of dollars each year on programs designed to increase the resources available to hospitals that serve the poor. This paper explores the intended and unintended effects of such targeted funds. First, how do these funds distort the behavior of state and local governments who wish to appropriate the funds for other uses? Second, to the extent that these funds do increase resources in the targeted hospitals, do patients benefit? We use the rapid and uneven growth in Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments across states and hospitals to answer these questions. We identify states that were most able to appropriate DSH funds and show that, while DSH payments to public hospitals in these states were systematically diverted, DSH payments to other hospitals and in other states were not diverted. Additional resources that were made available to hospitals (rather than appropriated by the state) were associated with significant declines in infant and post-heart attack mortality. A range of evidence suggests that these improvements were due to better hospital care. Overall, our analysis implies that public subsidies can be an effective mechanism for improving medical care and outcomes for the poor, but that the impact is limited by the ability of state and local government to divert the targeted funds.
The Nature of Constitutions

Following Thomas Hobbes, public-choice economists have theorized that constitutions arise from agreements among subordinates to establish private rules for their own transactions with each other. They then supposedly delegate to a sovereign the obligation to enforce these rules. The sovereign then violates the constitution by instituting wrong-headed rules to govern the subordinates' relations with each other. Instead, it seems more realistic to see constitutions as arising from subordinates' agreements with each other to resist excessive appropriations by the sovereign. An advanced constitution is a substitute for this original type of agreement, which only works well when the subordinates' numbers are small, as in some hunter-gatherer societies. An advanced constitution arises only from subordinates' threats of the sovereign and marshals the sovereign's own instruments of force against him.
Moderating “Cry Wolf” Events with Excess MAD in Benford's Law Research and Practice

ABSTRACT: False positives or “Type I errors,” wherein test results indicate fraud where none actually exists, have been described as a costly “cry wolf problem” in auditing practice. Benford's Law,...
Three Transnational Discourses of Labor Law in Domestic Reforms

Current labor law debates, in the United States and elsewhere, reflect entrenched discursive positions that make potential reform seem impossible. This Article identifies and examines the three most influential positions, which it names the “social,” “the neoliberal,” and the “rights-based” approach. It shows that these discursive positions are truly transnational in character. In contrast with conventional wisdom, which accepts the incompatibility of these positions, this Article creates a conceptual framework that productively combines elements from each to enrich the debates over labor law reform and to foster institutional imagination. Applying this framework, the Article examines the collective bargaining systems of the United States and Mexico comparatively. It illustrates how the Mexican labor law regime could embrace the democratic aspirations of the rights-based position (dominant in the United States) without eliminating labor rules that facilitate collective bargaining. In contrast, the American labor law regime could embrace the aspirations of the social position (dominant in Mexico) to ease workers’ organization and facilitate collective bargaining, without undermining the system’s democratic character. This analysis draws attention to possibilities that have been forec* Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. I would like to thank Lama Abu-Odeh, Graciela Bensusan, Francesca Bignami, Amy Cohen, Matthew Dimick, Karen Engle, Chai Feldblum, William Forbath, Judy Fudge, James Forman Jr., Michael Gottesman, Jennifer Gordon, Heidi Li Feldman, David Kennedy, Duncan Kennedy, Karl Klare, Virginia Mantouvalou, Guy Mundlak, Nina Pillard, Kerry Rittich, Peter Rosenblum, Daria Roithmayr, Ashwini Sukthankar, Dimitris Stevis, Katherine Stone, Christopher Tomlins, Philomila Tsoukala, Vanessa Waldref, and David Trubek for their criticisms and suggestions. I am grateful to participants in the Georgetown Law Faculty Workshop, Columbia Law School’s “Labor Rights as Human Rights?” roundtable, the “Global Law Workshop” at George Washington University Law School, and the “International Labor and Employment Law” panel at the 2009 Law and Society Association Meeting for valuable comments. David Suozzi provided excellent research assistance. 1 Santos: Three Transnational Discourses of Labor Law in Domestic Reform Published by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository, 2014 SANTOS.DOC 11/23/2010 3:55 PM 124 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. [Vol. 32:1 losed in each country and, by showing how they have been opened up elsewhere, suggests potential alternatives for institutional experimentation in domestic reform.
Corporate social responsibility and firm performance: Investor preferences and corporate strategies

We address the debate about whether firms should engage in socially responsible behavior by proposing a theoretical model in which the supply of and demand for socially responsible investment opportunities determine whether these activities will improve, reduce, or have no impact on a firm's market value. The theory shows that managers in publicly traded firms might fund socially responsible activities that do not maximize the present value of their firm's future cash flows yet still maximize the market value of the firm.
Repeat offenders: If they learn, we punish them more severely

Many legal systems are designed to punish repeat offenders more severely than first time offenders. However, existing economic literature generally offers either mixed or qualified results regarding optimal punishment of repeat offenders. This paper analyzes optimal punishment schemes in a two period model, where the social planner announces possibly different sanctions for offenders based on their detection history. When offenders learn how to evade the detection mechanism employed by the government, escalating punishments can be optimal. The contributions of this paper can be listed as follows: First, it identifies and formalizes a source which may produce a marginal effect in the direction of punishing repeat offenders more severely, namely learning. Next, it identifies conditions under which the tendency in legal systems to punish repeat offenders more severely is justified. Overall, the findings suggest that traditional variables identified so far in the literature are not the only relevant ones in deciding how repeat offenders should be punished, and that learning dynamics should also be taken into account.
Undocumented Workers: Crossing the Borders of Immigration and Workplace Law

Excerpt] This Article endeavors to comprehensively outline the emerging field of immployment law. As this Article specifies below, this field broadly includes empirical, legislative, administrative, judicial, and other analytical inquiries and trends involving workers who bridge the divide between immigration law and workplace law. This Article also proposes directions for future research in this area. Namely, it raises a broad array of compelling questions that merit intensive scholarly, judicial, and policy analysis moving forward. As this Article will show, a hybrid analytical lens reveals otherwise obscured areas of inquiry. It thereby encourages scholars, policymakers, enforcement agency officials, and courts to more comprehensively develop immployment frameworks and research agendas that directly consider the interaction between immigration and employment protections for employees. To support these contentions, this Article draws from a variety of recent scholarly, legislative, case law, enforcement, and advocacy developments in the immployment law area. It also builds on the contributions of leading experts and scholars in this issue of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy and at a recent workshop organized by Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences. The workshop, similar to this Article, was entitled “Undocumented Workers: Crossing the Borders of Immigration and Workplace Law” (hereinafter the “Crossing the Borders Workshop”).
Multiple groups identification in the linear-in-means model

Abstract A solution to the identification failure of linear-in-means models is found through a generalization to include between-group effects. With between-group contextual and endogenous effects, it is found that the linear-in-means model can be identified under very minor rank conditions.
Computing minimal forecast horizons: An integer programming approach

In this paper, we use integer programming (IP) to compute minimal forecast horizons for the classical dynamic lot-sizing problem (DLS). As a solution approach for computing forecast horizons, integer programming has been largely ignored by the research community. It is our belief that the modelling and structural advantages of the IP approach coupled with the recent significant developments in computational integer programming make for a strong case for its use in practice. We formulate some well-known sufficient conditions, and necessary and sufficient conditions (characterizations) for forecast horizons as feasibility/optimality questions in 0–1 mixed integer programs. An extensive computational study establishes the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Princelings and Paupers? State Employment and the Distribution of Human Capital Investments Among Households in Viet Nam

Inequality in access to education is known to be a key driver of income inequality in developing countries. Viet Nam, a transitional economy, exhibits significant segmentation in the market for ski...
ACTUALIZING INTIMATE PARTNERSHIP THEORY

This article offers concrete ways to modernize and advance existing laws governing the economics of couple relationships through fuller development and implementation of a “partnership of equals” theory. This is much needed because contemporary law does not adequately protect against financial vulnerabilities produced by partnering, and does not fairly share its benefits. As a result, law contributes to inequalities across a range of groups: between men and women; between cohabitants and married couples; and between same sex and opposite sex couples. Accordingly, I recommend a shift in law's foundation and application. Couple's law should be based on economic sharing behavior, broadly and specifically defined to include decision making as well as labor contributions, and should apply to unmarried as well as married couples. Further, law must recognize that sharing activities often importantly shape each partner's financial situation, including, to an extent, earning power. Drawing on this foundation, I describe specific ways to actualize these principles in legal practice, focusing on when couples break up. Economic advantages and disadvantages that were developed jointly should be shared. At the same time, however, some financial resources are not or are not completely shaped by partnering. In addition, sharing patterns can vary, with the vast majority of married couples being strongly economically intertwined and cohabitants being widely variable. So, for all intimate partnerships, I propose that the legal standard should be an assessment of the degree of economic interdependence in the relationship with resulting rules for sharing property and income streams that vary accordingly. As ripe arenas for extending the reach of the partnership model I offer, for married couples, I focus on alimony and the recent push for guidelines and caps, and for cohabitants, I briefly consider support obligations and the nascent shift in U.S. law toward a joint property regime. Key Points for Family Court Community: • Develops and modernizes theory of partnership of equals. • Critiques family law for inadequate response to couples’ sharing behaviors and it effects. • Critiques family law for contributing to inequality between men and women; cohabitants and spouses; and same sex and opposite sex couples. • Proposes integration of partnership sharing rules to alimony. • Proposes integration of partnership sharing rules to cohabitants. • Maps practitioner arguments for drawing on partnership within existing laws. • Updates current rules and trends in couple's law.
Copyright as Contract

Copyright is essentially a contract between the author and the public with the government acting as the agent of the public. The consideration received by authors is defined by duration and breadth of exclusivity. The consideration for the public is the creation of a "work" that will be available on a limited basis for the life of the author plus 70 years and then available without limit after that. If there were no transaction costs at all, it would be possible to "pay" authors different amounts of exclusivity. Perhaps a greeting card would get one holiday season of exclusivity, if anything. Works that are not original and do not demonstrate a modicum of creativity would not qualify as consideration and receive no exclusivity in return. And, in some cases, an author - say one writing a book that will be a guaranteed best seller - could be required to pay a considerable amount of the right to exclusivity that makes those earnings possible. By necessity the contract in question is a form contract which, unlike other forms, is drafted to the disadvantage of the drafter. This Article tracks the similarities of copyright law and contract law and suggests that viewing copyright as basically contractual would result in a much more rational system of copyright law. Specific proposals include 1) incentives for greater formality; 2) distinguishing copyright dependent works from those that are not; 3) sanctions for the false claims of copyright; and 4) the use of a liability rule as opposed to a property rule in instances of infringement.
Restructuring Municipal Bankruptcy

What sorts of legal relief should be available to a municipality in financial distress? Chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code has served as an option of last resort for many municipalities over the years. But as this Article illustrates, Chapter 9 arguably falls short of an effective solution and at times seems to contravene the foundational principles underlying bankruptcy law. By examining recent Chapter 9 filings, this Article presents a comprehensive analysis of how and why Chapter 9 has failed to address the problems that characterize municipal insolvencies. It argues that Chapter 9, in both practice and principle, has proved unsatisfactory in combating the very issues it was designed to resolve. After highlighting Chapter 9’s shortcomings, this Article suggests critical areas of reform that will begin to reconcile Chapter 9 with the broader goals of bankruptcy law
MANAGING PRODUCT VARIETY: AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Variety management has emerged as a crucial dimension of successful business practice. In this paper, I first provide a framework for managerial decisions about variety. Variety-creation decisions determine the amount, type, and timing of end-product variety, while variety-implementation decisions focus on the design and operation of internal processes and a supply chain to support a firm's variety-creation strategy. I organize variety-related decisions into four key decision themes in variety creation: 1) dimensions of variety, 2) product architecture, 3) degree of customization, and 4) timing; and three key decision themes in variety implementation: 1) process capabilities, 2) points of variegation, and 3) day-to-day decisions. I describe each theme and review the relevant literature on each theme, with a focus on research that provides insight to problems faced in practice. Finally, I identify untapped avenues for future research that would be of value to the practicing manager, paying special attention to interdependencies among decision themes.
An Introduction to Logical Entropy and its Relation to Shannon Entropy

The logical basis for information theory is the newly developed logic of partitions that is dual to the usual Boolean logic of subsets. The key concept is a "distinction" of a partition, an ordered pair of elements in distinct blocks of the partition. The logical concept of entropy based on partition logic is the normalized counting measure of the set of distinctions of a partition on a finite set--just as the usual logical notion of probability based on the Boolean logic of subsets is the normalized counting measure of the subsets (events). Thus logical entropy is a measure on the set of ordered pairs, and all the compound notions of entropy (join entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information) arise in the usual way from the measure (e.g., the inclusion-exclusion principle)--just like the corresponding notions of probability. The usual Shannon entropy of a partition is developed by replacing the normalized count of distinctions (dits) by the average number of binary partitions (bits) necessary to make all the distinctions of the partition.
Customers and investors: A framework for understanding the evolution of financial institutions

Abstract Financial institutions are financed by both investors and customers. Investors expect an appropriate risk-adjusted return for providing financing and risk bearing. Customers, in contrast, provide financing in exchange for specific services, and want the service fulfillment to be free of the intermediary's credit risk. We develop a framework that defines the roles of customers and investors in intermediaries, and use it to build an economic theory that has the following main findings. First, with positive net social surplus in the intermediary-customer relationship, the efficient (first best) contract completely insulates the customer from the intermediary's credit risk, thereby exposing the customer only to the risk inherent in the contract terms. Second, when intermediaries face financing frictions, the second-best contract may expose the customer to some intermediary credit risk, generating “customer contract fulfillment” costs. Third, the efficiency loss associated with these costs in the second best rationalizes government guarantees like deposit insurance even when there is no threat of bank runs. We further discuss the implications of this customer-investor nexus for numerous issues related to the design of contracts between financial intermediaries and their customers, the sharing of risks between them, ex ante efficient institutional design, regulatory practices, and the evolving boundaries between banks and financial markets.
Do Pension Plans with Participant Investment Choice Teach Households to Hold More Equity

Some retirement plans allow the participant to choose how funds are invested. Having to direct investments may provide the participant with financial education. This paper finds that U.S. households covered by pension plans in which the employee chooses investments are significantly more apt to hold stock outside of their retirement plan than are households with pension plans oering no such choice. The eect of investment choice upon non-pension asset allocation is not explained by portfolio rebalancing or observable dierences in income and saving preferences across households. This provides some evidence that the design of a pension plan may influence an employee’s financial decisions outside of the pension plan, although unobserved heterogeneity in worker’s preferences could also explain the result. The past two decades has seen a dramatic shift in private pension plans in the U.S. In 1975, 39% of the workforce was covered by a defined benefit pension plan and only 14% was covered by a defined contribution plan (US Department of Labor (1997)). Twenty years later, defined contribution plan coverage was nearly 40% while about one in four workers had a defined benefit plan." Workers now play a more active role in providing for their retirement through work. Many defined contribution plans, most notably 401(k)s, allow participants to control the level of contributions and in some cases direct how assets are invested.# While much attention has been given to how such retirement plans aect the leael of saving (Poterba, Venti, and Wise (1996), Engen, Gale, and Scholz (1996)), less research has addressed how they aect a household’s composition of saving or portfolio decisions. Given the equity premium * I thank Je Brown, Courtney Coile, Peter Diamond, Jonathan Gruber, Jerry Hausman, Martha StarrMcCluer, Jim Poterba, and two anonymous referees for useful comments. Financial support from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Aging is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research. " A defined benefit (DB) plan is a formula-based retirement plan. The typical DB plan provides a lifetime nominal annuity at retirement, with the benefit being a function of years of service, highest salary earned, etc. In a defined contribution (DC) plan, employees make contributions to an individual account based on employee salary, employee contributions, employer match, and}or employer profits. The worker is responsible for gains and losses that accrue in the account. Examples of DC plans are money purchase plans, ESOPs, thrift or savings plans, TIAA-CREF, and 401(k)s. In 1993, contributions to 401(k) plans accounted for over 2}3 of total DC plan contributions (Bassett, Fleming, and Rodrigues (1998)). # 1993 Form 5500 filings indicate that 65% (73% when weighted by assets and 73% when weighted by participants) of 401(k) plans with 100 or more participants were participant-directed (US GAO (1997)).
Criminal records and housing: an experimental study

This study examined whether a certificate of employment, which was created to help ex-offenders secure employment, could aid ex-offenders in securing housing and whether housing outcomes vary for ex-offenders possessing older and less serious criminal records. Four hundred and twenty property managers and owners were randomly sampled from stratified neighborhoods and randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups: recent misdemeanor record, felony record with a Certificate of Qualification for Employment (CQE), old felony record, and recent felony record. We found that CQEs aid ex-offenders in finding housing. Severity and recency of offenses are inversely related to housing outcomes. Furthermore, single-family dwellings may be most accessible to ex-offenders.Findings suggest that reentry planning should encourage ex-offenders to pursue CQEs for purposes beyond their designed intent and include discussions regarding residence type and housing outcomes. Findings also suggest that the stigma of a criminal record and the resulting negative consequences continue long after conviction. Policy-makers should consider revising expungement laws to encompass a wider range of offenders with old criminal records.
Ordering Gini indexes of multivariate elliptical risks

Abstract Gini index is a well-known tool in economics that is often used for measuring income inequality. In insurance, the index and its modifications have been used to compare the riskiness of portfolios, to order reinsurance contracts, and to summarize insurance scores (relativities). In this paper, we establish several stochastic orders between the Gini indexes of multivariate elliptical risks with the same marginals but different dependence structures. This work is motivated by the applied studies of Brazauskas et al. (2007) and Samanthi et al. (2015), who employed the Gini index to compare the riskiness of insurance portfolios. Based on extensive Monte Carlo simulations, these authors have found that the power function of the associated hypothesis test increases as portfolios become more positively correlated. The comparison of the Gini indexes (of empirically estimated risk measures) presented in this paper provides a theoretical explanation to this statistical phenomenon. Moreover, it enriches the studies of the problem of central concentration of elliptical distributions and generalizes the pd-1 order proposed by Shaked and Tong (1985).
THE COST OF CREDIBILITY: THE COMPANY OF GENERAL FARMS AND FISCAL STAGNATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

The Company of General Farms, a quasi-private collector of about half the French taxes in the eighteenth century, was one of the largest lenders to the Crown. The relationship between the Crown and General Farms fits the model of sovereign debt as a contingent claim. Lending is sustained in contingent claims models if the lender credibly commits to withhold funds from the sovereign if he defaults. The General Farms maintained this commitment with amonopsony of the Crown's access to taxes and borrowed funds. When revolution threatened, the monopsony stood between the Crown and reform of the fiscal system. The history of the Company of General Farms shows how a contingent claims equilibrium can raise the cost of legitimate reform.
Protecting Privacy with Deceptive Trade Practices Legislation

This article argues that common information practices - collecting transactional information about consumers and selling it to others without the knowledge or consent of the affected consumers - violates both the FTC Act and state UDAP statutes. The article discusses the trade in consumer information, decisions under the FTC Act's prohibitions on unfair and deceptive trade practices, and cases under state UDAP statutes.