cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Special Economic Zones in the United States: From Colonial Charters, to Foreign-Trade Zones, toward USSEZs

Special economic zones (SEZs) and the United States have a long and complicated relationship. The lineage of the United States runs back to proto-SEZs, created when Old World governments sold entrepreneurs charters to build for-profit colonies in the New World, such as Jamestown and New Amsterdam. In more recent times, though, the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in tapping the potential of SEZs, which have exploded in number, types, territory, and population. True, the US hosts a large and growing number of Foreign-Trade Zones (FTZs), but these do little more than exempt select companies from federal customs obligations. Elsewhere, SEZs have done much more to increase jurisdictional competition and improve citizens' lives. Consider the SEZs that spread from Hong Kong throughout China, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process, or the huge private developments now taking root in Africa, Arabia, and India. This paper proposes that the United States combine the best of foreign and domestic policies to create a new generation of SEZs. These United States Special Economic Zones (USSEZs) would arise on federally owned property, such as lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and generate sorely needed public funds by liquidating the value of territorial exemptions from certain state and federal taxes, laws, and regulations. Through USSEZs, Americans might once more employ special jurisdictions to promote economic growth, human welfare, and individual freedom. Special Economic Zones in the United States: From Colonial Charters, to ForeignTrade Zones, Toward USSEZs
Network Effects in Alternative Fuel Adoption: Empirical Analysis of the Market for Ethanol

This paper investigates the importance of network effects in the demand for ethanol-compatible vehicles and the supply of ethanol fuel. An indirect network effect, or positive feedback loop, arises in this context due to spatially-dependent complementarities in the availability of ethanol fuel and the installed base of ethanol-compatible vehicles. Marketers and social planners are interested in whether these effects exist, and if so, how policy might accelerate adoption of the ethanol fuel standard within a targeted population. To measure these feedback effects, I develop an econometric framework that considers the simultaneous determination of ethanol-compatible vehicle demand and ethanol fuel supply in local markets. The demand-side model considers the automobile purchase decisions of consumers and fleet operators; the supply-side model considers the ethanol market entry decisions of competing fuel retailers. The framework extends extant market entry models by endogenizing the market size shifting fuel retailer profits. I estimate the model using zip code panel data from four states over a nine-year period. The model estimates provide evidence of a network effect. Under typical market conditions, entry of an additional ethanol fuel retailer leads to a 6% increase in the probability of ethanol-compatible vehicle purchase. The entry model estimates imply that the first entrant requires a local installed base of approximately 300 ethanol-compatible vehicles to be profitable. As an application, I demonstrate that subsidizing fuel retailers to offer ethanol in selective geographic markets can be an effective policy to indirectly increase ethanol-compatible vehicle sales.
Comparing lifeact and phalloidin for super-resolution imaging of actin in fixed cells.

Visualizing actin filaments in fixed cells is of great interest for a variety of topics in cell biology such as cell division, cell movement, and cell signaling. We investigated the possibility of replacing phalloidin, the standard reagent for super-resolution imaging of F-actin in fixed cells, with the actin binding peptide ‘lifeact’. We compared the labels for use in single molecule based super-resolution microscopy, where AlexaFluor 647 labeled phalloidin was used in a dSTORM modality and Atto 655 labeled lifeact was used in a single molecule imaging, reversible binding modality. We found that imaging with lifeact had a comparable resolution in reconstructed images and provided several advantages over phalloidin including lower costs, the ability to image multiple regions of interest on a coverslip without degradation, simplified sequential super-resolution imaging, and more continuous labeling of thin filaments.
Trusting the Courts: Redressing the State Court Funding Crisis

In recent years, state courts have suffered serious funding reductions that have threatened their ability to resolve criminal and civil cases in a timely fashion. Proposals for addressing this state court funding crisis have emphasized public education and the creation of coalitions to influence state legislatures. These strategies are unlikely to succeed, however, and new institutional arrangements are necessary. Dedicated state trust funds using specific state revenue sources to fund courts offer the most promise for adequate and stable state court funding.
Dynamic Prediction Pools: An Investigation of Financial Frictions and Forecasting Performance

We apply a novel methodology for estimating time-varying weights in linear prediction pools, which we call Dynamic Pools, and use it to investigate the relative forecasting performance of DSGE models with and without financial frictions for output growth and inflation from 1992 to 2011. We find strong evidence of time variation in the pool’s weights, reflecting the fact that the DSGE model with financial frictions produces superior forecasts in periods of financial distress but does not perform as well in tranquil periods. The dynamic pool’s weights react in a timely fashion to changes in the environment, leading to real-time forecast improvements relative to other methods of density forecast combination, such as equal-weights combination, Bayesian model averaging, optimal static pools, and dynamic model averaging. We show how a policymaker dealing with model uncertainty could have used a dynamic pool to perform a counterfactual exercise (responding to the gap in labor market conditions) in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman crisis.
Serial Correlation in Management Earnings Forecast Errors

We examine whether management earnings forecast errors exhibit serial correlation and how analysts understand the serial correlation property of management forecast errors (MFEs). MFEs should not exhibit serial correlation if managers efficiently process information in prior forecast errors and truthfully convey their earnings expectations through management forecasts. However, for long-horizon management forecasts of annual earnings, we find significantly positive serial correlation in MFEs, and sample self-selection does not seem to drive this phenomenon. Further analyses suggest that managers’ unintentional information processing bias contributes to this positive serial correlation. Analysts anticipate the intertemporal persistence of MFEs but underestimate the persistence level when reacting to management forecasts. Our findings have implications for market participants who rely on management forecasts to form earnings expectations, and also shed light on the efficiency of managerial decision making.
Little Brother is Watching You: New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes

The “new paternalism” claims that careful policy interventions can help people make better decisions in terms of their own welfare, with only mild or nonexistent infringement of personal autonomy and choice. This claim to moderation is not sustainable. Applying the insights of the modern literature on slippery slopes to new paternalist policies suggests that such policies are particularly vulnerable to expansion. This is true even if policymakers are fully rational. More importantly, the slippery-slope potential is especially great if policymakers are not fully rational, but instead share the behavioral and cognitive biases attributed to the people their policies are supposed to help. Accepting the new paternalist approach creates a risk of accepting, in the long run, greater restrictions on individual autonomy than have been heretofore acknowledged.
Costs to Comply with SOX Section 404

This study examines companies' costs to comply with SOX 404 and identifies factors that are associated with these costs. SOX 404 costs can be classified into three categories: internal labor costs,...
Developing a Government Reporting Taxonomy

ABSTRACT: The municipal bond market is a $3.7 trillion market with approximately 75 percent of the market held by private investors (SEC 2012). Municipal bondholders and potential buyers do not have the same level of information as those investors choosing to invest in public companies. This inequity is, in part, the result of poor data accessibility. Frequently the data provided are in a format that does not allow easy comparison across governments or over time. To increase comparability and consistency in government reporting we build a government financial reporting taxonomy using the empirical approach. The completed taxonomy has 194 terms that cover financial statements filed by municipalities. Expert analysts and preparers in government reporting reviewed the completed taxonomy. This study has implications for the municipal reporting market and those entities that regulate them by providing a validated municipal government financial reporting taxonomy.
The Incompetence Trap: The (Conditional) Irrelevance of Agency Expertise

Formal models of the appointments process typically cast the decision of the appointing executive as one where an open position is assumed and an appointee is chosen in order to maximize the utility of the executive (and perhaps that of the legislature if confirmation is required). However, several — often patronage-focused — processes within the appointments process focus instead on finding acceptable positions for “necessary-to-place” individuals. Here, I develop a model where the goal is to find the best position for such an individual. In contrast to many existing models of the appointments process, I find that when the personnel process is focused on finding the best position for a given person as opposed to finding the best person for a given position, “turkey farms” — agencies that have high numbers of minimally-competent (but necessary-to-place) individuals among their ranks — can result in equilibrium. Moreover, once agency capacity is sufficiently low, incompetent individual appointees no longer have detrimental effects on the utilities of the appointing principals, which further incentivizes the usage of certain agencies as “turkey farms.”
The Private Enforcement of Immigration Laws

I. THE SCOPE OF PRIVATE ENFORCEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 A. DEFINING PRIVATE ENFORCEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782 B. THE EXPANDING REACH OF PRIVATE ENFORCEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . 785 1. Employment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 787 2. Housing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 791 3. Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 793 4. Future Areas for Private Enforcement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 796 a. Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 796 b. Medical Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 798 c. Charity and Other Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 800
The risk return tradeoff in the long run: 1836–2003

Abstract Previous studies typically find a statistically insignificant relation between the market risk premium and its expected volatility. Further, several of these studies estimate a negative risk return tradeoff, contrary to the predictions of mainstream theory. Using simulations, I demonstrate that even 100 years of data constitute a small sample that may easily lead to this finding even though the true risk return tradeoff is positive. Small-sample inference is plagued by the fact that conditional volatility has almost no explanatory power for realized returns. Using the nearly two century history of U.S. equity market returns from Schwert [1990. Indexes of United States stock prices from 1802 to 1987. Journal of Business 63, 399–426], I estimate a positive and statistically significant risk return tradeoff. Finally, exploratory analysis suggests a role for a time-varying relation linked to the changing nature of the U.S. economy.
Tirole's Industrial Regulation and Organization Legacy in Economics

Jean Tirole was awarded the 2014 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his analysis of market power and regulation. This paper provides an overview of some of that work, and of his related contributions to game theory.
An Experimental Investigation of How Self-Interested Organizational Norms Undermine Prosocial Motivation and Influence Employee Effort

Managers often implement behavioral controls to prevent free riding, especially in group settings where individual effort is difficult to measure. We argue that to the extent these controls signal a norm of self-interest in the workplace, they are likely to result in lower trust and employee effort. We predict and find that controls that send stronger signals of self-interest are especially detrimental to employees with high levels of prosocial motivation—individuals who tend to be less self-interested than their peers. Our results suggest managers should consider how behavioral controls signal self-interested organizational norms and influence employee outcomes.
Memory Lost: Brown v. Board and the Constitutional Economy of Liberty and Race

This article shows how race impacts the concept of Liberty in Supreme Court Jurisprudence over four periods of US History to reinforce a dominant political economy. It shows how the Court's present political economy blinds us to the real judicial context of Brown v. Board of Ed. thereby reinforcing anti affirmative action ideas and racial segregation.
Mortgage Default with Asymmetric Information

This article analyzes mortgage-market equilibrium when borrower default costs are private information. By applying the approach of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), it is shown that asymmetric information regarding default costs distorts the contract choices available in the mortgage market, preventing safe borrowers (those with high default costs) from fully satisfying their demand for mortgage debt. Large loans are available for a substantial interest-rate premium, but only risky borrowers find this premium worth paying. The article builds on an empirical literature designed to test the ruthless-default principle from option-based models of mortgage pricing. That literature provides evidence against ruthless behavior, suggesting that default costs play an important role in borrower decisions. The article takes a further step by arguing that such costs are private information, which has important implications for market equilibrium.
Navigating the Incoherence of Big Data Reform Proposals

From 2012–14 various branches of the federal government published five major reports that either deal generally with modern challenges to privacy or specifically address the privacy threats of big data. All five displayed serious intent and were based on reasonably rigorous analysis. While these reports, to lesser and greater extents, all expressed the necessity for legislative or regulatory intervention, their recommendations are diverse. It may be that this lack of coherence is one of the reasons why no legislation has been proffered. In this article, I describe the various proposals and offer a critical synthesis, arguing that Congress needs to take up the 2012 White House FIPPS proposals and ensure that data subjects have more control over what data are collected and that the contexts for any collection are respected.
International migration: a panel data analysis of the determinants of bilateral flows

In this paper, I empirically investigate the determinants of migration inflows into 14 OECD countries by country of origin between 1980 and 1995. I analyze the effect on migration of average income and income dispersion in destination and origin countries. I also examine the impact of geographical, cultural, and demographic factors as well as the role played by changes in destination countries’ migration policies. My analysis both delivers estimates consistent with the predictions of the international migration model and generates empirical puzzles.
Trading Volume: Definitions, Data Analysis, and Implications of Portfolio Theory

We examine the implications of portfolio theory for the cross-sectional behavior of equity trading volume. Two-fund separation theorems suggest a natural definition for trading activity: share turnover. If two-fund separation holds,share turnover must be identical for all securities. If (K + 1)-fund separation holds,we show that turnover satisfies an approximately linear K-factor structure. These implications are examined empirically using individual weekly turnover data for NYSE and AMEX securities from 1962 to 1996. We find strong evidence against two-fund separation,and a principal-components decomposition suggests that turnover is well approximated by a two-factor linear model. If price and quantity are the fundamental building blocks of any theory of market interactions,the importance of trading volume in modeling asset markets is clear. Although most models of asset markets have focused on the behavior of returns—predictability,variability,and information content— their implications for trading volume have received far less attention. In this article we derive the implications of various asset-market models for volume and quantify their importance using recently available volume data for individual securities from the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). Although the volume literature is voluminous, 1 we hope to add to this literature in two ways. First,we develop the volume implications of popular asset-market models rather than construct more specialized and often “stylized” models to
Comparing the Publication Process in Accounting, Economics, Finance, Management, Marketing, Psychology, and the Natural Sciences

SYNOPSIS: I present two types of data about the publication and review process in the accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing, psychology, and natural science disciplines. First, I collect all articles published in 2012 in top-tier journals of these disciplines and compare the articles based on word counts, figures, and tables included in each article, the time it took to be published, citations, the number of co-authors, and submission fees. I then survey academics in each discipline. Survey questions were designed to evaluate overall perceptions of the review process, changes in the review process in the last five years, opinions about appropriate acceptance rates, assessment of reviewers and editors, and general assessments of reviewers and the review process, faculty evaluation, and journals. While there are many results, key results for the accounting discipline include very low citation patterns relative to other disciplines, a belief that reviewers have not improved in the last five y...
The Commercial Loss Doctrine: Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury... Look at this Tangle of Thorns

The line between tort and contract law has never been definitively drawn, especially when it comes to product liability law and construction law. In some instances, the theories have become so intertwined that practitioners have adopted the nomenclature of "contort" to designate claims that contain both theories of tort and contract. In an attempt to keep the line between contract claims and tort claims distinguishable, most states have adopted some form of the Commercial Loss Doctrine. Originally applied in product liability cases, the traditional Commercial Loss Doctrine holds that when a product is defective, a party may not recover in tort unless the defect causes personal injury or damage to property other than the product itself and does so via a sudden and calamitous event. I will refer to this definition as the traditional Commercial Loss Doctrine or traditional Moorman doctrine throughout this paper. However, much of the confusion in the application of the Commercial Loss Doctrine stems from the fact that this definition only applies to product liability law and not to other areas of law, such as service contracts or construction contracts. I will attempt to make two arguments in this article. Part I of this article argues that when courts need to determine whether the Commercial Loss Doctrine applies, they should not begin by asking whether the loss is "economic." Instead, the court should analyze whether the duties between the parties arose via the contract between the parties or via extra-contractual duties which govern the relationship between the parties. If the latter, then tort claims should be allowed. In determining whether extra-contractual duties exist, courts must articulate rational or historical policy reasons for the existence of such duties. The second part of this article argues that the Commercial Loss Doctrine should be applied to bar tort claims in the construction industry because the policy reasons for allowing tort claims in product liability cases do not apply in the construction industry.
Estimation of Dynamic Discrete Choice Models in Continuous Time with an Application to Retail Competition

This paper provides a method for estimating and solving dynamic discrete choice models in a continuous time framework that is computationally light. The method is particularly useful in dynamic games. In the proposed framework, players face a standard dynamic discrete choice problem at decision times that occur stochastically. The resulting stochastic-sequential structure naturally admits the use of CCP methods for estimation and makes it possible to compute counterfactual simulations for relatively high-dimensional games. We apply our techniques to examine the impact of Walmart’s entry into the retail grocery industry, showing that even the threat of entry by Walmart has a substantial eect on market structure.
Shareholder-Initiated Class Action Lawsuits: Shareholder Wealth Effects and Industry Spillovers

This paper documents significantly negative stock price reactions to shareholder-initiated class action lawsuits. We find that shareholders partially anticipate these lawsuits based on lawsuit filings against other firms in the same industry and capitalize part of these losses prior to a lawsuit filing date. We show that the more likely a firm is to be sued, the larger the partial anticipation effect (shareholder losses capitalized prior to a lawsuit filing date) and the smaller the filing date effect (shareholder losses measured on the lawsuit filing date). Our evidence suggests that previous research that typically focuses on the filing date effect understates the magnitude of shareholder losses, and that such an understatement is greater for firms with a higher likelihood of being sued.
Coping with disaster: The impact of hurricanes on international financial flows, 1970-2002

How well do countries cope with the aftermath of natural disasters? Do international financial flows buffer countries in the wake of disasters? This paper examines the impact of hurricanes on resource flows to developing countries. Using meteorological data, I construct a time-varying storm index taking into account the fraction of a country's population exposed to storms of varying intensities. Overall, hurricanes lead to large increases in foreign aid. For other types of international financial flows, the impact of hurricanes varies according to income level. For poorer countries, hurricanes lead to increases in migrants' remittances, so that total inflows from all sources in the three years following hurricane exposure amount to roughly four-fifths of estimated damages. For richer countries, by contrast, hurricanes stimulate inflows of new lending from multilateral institutions, but offsetting declines in private financial flows are so large that the null hypothesis of zero damage replacement cannot be rejected.
Intersectionality and the Notion of Disability in EU discrimination law

Defining the characteristics targeted by banning discrimination constitutes a central challenge for EU discrimination law, and defining disability is particularly challenging due to the dispute around the very concept of disability. From 2006, the Court of Justice has wrestled with this definition in six judgments, five of which were delivered from 2013. Instead of classifying the case law definition as conforming to a medical or social model of disability, this article analyses the case law with a view to illustrate challenges of defining discrimination grounds generally, demanding that a sufficiently precise and non-exclusive definition of each discrimination ground can be achieved by re-focusing EU discrimination law around the nodes of sex, race and disability. The analysis exposes that the ECJ definition of disability neither complies with the UN CRPD nor adequately responds to intersectionality theory, for example because the definition is exclusionary in relation to the female experience of disability.
Evolving Relationship between Law, Offshoring of Professional Services, Intellectual Property, and International Organizations

This article covers four issues. First, it examines evolving international conventions to determine whether countries, especially developed countries, can take any steps to inhibit offshoring with the objective of protecting jobs in their respective countries. Second, it looks at statistics from independent sources to see if outsourcing exceeds insourcing, or vice versa, in the case of the U.S. Third, it looks at trends in outsourcing in the legal arena. Fourth, it looks at the intellectual property aspects of outsourcing and presents a long-term vision on how this ticklish issue is likely to be addressed in the long-term.
Estimating fractional cointegration in the presence of polynomial trends

We propose and derive the asymptotic distribution of a tapered narrow-band least squares estimator (NBLSE) of the cointegration parameter β in the framework of fractional cointegration. This tapered estimator is invariant to deterministic polynomial trends. In particular, we allow for arbitrary linear time trends that often occur in practice. Our simulations show that, in the case of no deterministic trends, the estimator is superior to ordinary least squares (OLS) and the nontapered NBLSE proposed by P.M. Robinson when the levels have a unit root and the cointegrating relationship between the series is weak. In terms of rate of convergence, our estimator converges faster under certain circumstances, and never slower, than either OLS or the nontapered NBLSE. In a data analysis of interest rates, we find stronger evidence of cointegration if the tapered NBLSE is used for the cointegration parameter than if OLS is used.
Dastar's Next Stand

A series of recent cases implicate the extent to which trademark law can be used to control creative content. The possibility of using trademark law for that purpose obviously creates a potential conflict with copyright law, which ordinarily sets the rules for use of creative material developed by others. Unfortunately, despite its attraction to boundary questions in trademark law, the Supreme Court‘s Dastar decision – its lone decision demarcating trademark and copyright law – remains controversial and its scope somewhat unclear. This Essay argues that Dastar should be understood, or at least should be extended, to rule out any claims based on confusion that is attributable to the content of a creative work, however that claim is denominated. This approach is better than ruling out trademark protection for all copyrightable works, even though it sweeps out some claims that do not raise the same concerns about conflict with copyright. It is better both because it is more consistent with trademark and unfair competition law‘s traditional role and because those other claims ought to be unsuccessful in virtually all cases in any event. This approach also has the virtue of creating certainty and allowing courts to dispose of cases early. In this respect, Dastar could play a role similar to TrafFix: Dastar would reserve to copyright law the rules for use of creative material, much as TrafFix reserves to patent law rules for control of useful features.
Evaluating Urban Public Schools: Parents, Teachers, and State Assessments

Among the most contentious questions in public administration is how the performance of public organizations should be evaluated, and nowhere is this issue more salient than in urban public schools. While significant attention has been devoted to studying administrative measures of public organizations, the views of citizens concerning performance have been widely criticized and are not frequently gathered by schools. How these assessments relate to each other is central to many questions in education policy (e.g., choice, equity) and has important implications for democracy, bureaucratic professionalism, and public performance. This debate can be viewed as focusing on the distinction between convergent validity and discriminant validity. Using data from New York City's public school system with a cross-sectional time-series approach, parent and teacher evaluations are compared to government records of schools’ characteristics and performance. The findings suggest that parents and teachers are able to conduct intelligent, meaningful evaluations of school quality.
A Century of Change in Personal Injury Law

The 20th century witnessed enormous change in American personal injury law. Over the past 100 years, torts has emerged out of a largely ineffective backwater of the law. Today, tort doctrine has coalesced around a robust law of negligence, anchored not only in contemporary concerns about fairness, but also in considerations of loss spreading and safety promotion. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural change, change in the legal and other professions, changes in civil procedure and evidence law, the development of liability insurance, and more have made it both much easier and far more natural for accident victims to sue in tort. Work, home, and leisure activities have also altered dramatically between 1900 and 2000, thereby sharply changing the nature of the accidents that Americans now suffer, as compared with the past. During this same era, some important categories of injuries were fully or partly removed from personal injury law, and tort failed to take hold in certain other areas which instead have come to be handled by other parts of our legal system. The 20th century has also seen the development of both broad public and private insurance schemes (social security and group health insurance) and modern regulatory agencies (like the FDA) that have also altered the role of personal injury law. The upshot is that the size and nature of the personal injury law system in the year 2000 differs enormously both from the system in place in the year 1900 and from what it might have been in the year 2000. Vital areas of tort law's realm today, like auto, medical malpractice and product liability cases, are essentially 20th century developments; yet important 20th century concerns about discrimination and the environment are little impacted by tort law. Nevertheless, many of the shortcomings of personal injury law in 1900 that led to worker's compensation as a replacement for tort in the case of occupational injuries still plague tort law's operation in 2000. However, the dramatic rise in the availability and amount of damages plaintiffs can obtain for pain and suffering, as well as the dramatic rise in the political and economic power of plaintiffs' lawyers, make future reform of tort law quite uncertain. As a result, tort law in the 21st century may be as exciting a field in which to teach, write and practice as it has been for much of the 20th.
Procyclical Leverage and Value-at-Risk

The availability of credit varies over the business cycle through shifts in the leverage of financial intermediaries. Empirically, we find that intermediary leverage is negatively aligned with the banks’ value-at-risk (VaR). Motivated by the evidence, we explore a contracting model that captures the observed features. Under general conditions on the outcome distribution given by Extreme Value Theory (EVT), intermediaries maintain a constant probability of default to shifts in the outcome distribution, implying substantial deleveraging during downturns. For some parameter values, we can solve the model explicitly, thereby endogenizing the VaR threshold probability from the contracting problem.
Fiduciary Obligations in the Internal Political Affairs of Labor Unions Under Section 501(a) of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act

Federal courts have not agreed upon the appropriate scope of their authority to judge whether union officials have violated their fiduciary obligations under § 501(a) of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The Second Circuit restricts application of § 501(a) to union affairs involving money and property; the Eighth Circuit considers fiduciary obligations in a wide range of union activities. The statute itself mandates that the duty of all officers be determined "taking into account the special problems and functions of a labor organization . . . ," but few courts have recognized this caveat in evaluating the conduct of union officials. Both the Second and Eighth Circuits apply inflexible standards to the conduct of officers of all labor organizations, irrespective of their characteristics. Per se reasoning whereby courts hold certain types of acts by union officials conclusively violative of § 501(a) has emerged. This article proposes a flexible approach to the application of § 501(a) and examines the proposal in the context of four recurrent patterns of internal union politics. The article concludes that courts should not deem acts of union officials per se violative of § 501(a) where union political matters are involved, but rather should examine the challenged conduct in the context of particular circumstances. Judicial management of union internal political affairs is no better than the evils which § 501(a) was designed to ameliorate.
Ancient Chinese theories of control

This article presents evidence about very ancient Chinese theories of managerial control – how superiors and subordinates should relate, and how to control, lead and motivate people. The ancient Chinese used duties and ceremonial etiquette to increase social integration. They also developed well-articulated bureaucracies with departments, coordination links among officials, standard operating procedures, and audits of officials’ performance.Before 350 BCE, the Chinese said leaders should lead by example rather than give orders, and should elicit support from their subordinates. Then, a different regime of managerial practice began to develop. A key element is this shift was the use of laws that were intended to help rulers strengthen their control and remain in power.
Public Uses and Non-Uses: Sinister Schemes, Improper Motives, and Bad Faith in Eminent Domain Law

This Article addresses the largely unexplored issue of whether a sovereign may use its power of eminent domain not to pursue an affirmative public use, but rather to prevent an undesired private use (such as a landfill, rehabilitation facility, or other NIMBY-triggering use) from going forward. The author argues that although sovereigns tend to dissemble in these non-use cases based upon an underlying assumption by condemnors and courts alike that non-use takings are not constitutionally permitted, their analysis is in fact, incorrect. It is not the non-use condemnations themselves that are problematic, but the subterfuge that condemnors typically use in pursuing such takings. The resulting lack of transparency in governmental action subverts the political process and weakens private property rights protection.
Standing at the Gates: A New Law Librarian Wonders About the Future Role of the Profession in Legal Research Education

ABSTRACT There have long been complaints about the legal research skills of law school students and recent graduates. In this article the author focuses on the period between the release of two important reports on legal education, the MacCrate Report in 1992 and the Carnegie Report in 2007, examining how law librarians and other professionals involved were engaged in responding to the problem. The author concludes that if law librarians want to be involved more fully in legal research education, some changes or reexamination of our professional culture and positions may be necessary.
Sticks and Carrots: The Effect of Contract Frame on Effort in Incomplete Contracts

ABSTRACT: In this study, we examine the effect of incentive contract framing on agent effort in an incomplete contract setting. Prior research suggests that when governed by complete incentive contracts, agents exert greater effort under penalty contracts relative to bonus contracts. However, in an incomplete contract setting, in which the incentive contract does not govern all tasks for which the agent is responsible, the agent's trust in the principal is relevant. In this setting, we predict that bonus contracts create a more trusting environment, and this effect spills over to tasks not governed by the incentive contract, such that bonus contracts elicit greater effort on these tasks as compared to penalty contracts. We develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model of the effects of contract frame on trust and effort in this incomplete contract setting. The main intuition behind the model is that the framing of an incentive contract affects the degree to which the contract terms are interpret...
Guatemala’s Peace Accords in a Free Trade Area of the Americas

The paper provides an anticipatory legal analysis of the implications of a Free Trade Area of the Americas for Guatemala's socio-economic and indigenous peace accords.
The Price of Street Friends: Social Networks, Informed Trading, and Shareholder Costs

Recent studies suggest the transfer of privileged information via social ties but do not explicitly examine the cost of these ties to shareholders. We document a significant positive relation between stock transaction costs and a company’s social ties to the investment community. Social ties based on education and leisure activities, stronger ties, and ties to individuals responsible for trading have greater effects. Using investment connection deaths as natural experiments, we document that exogenous severance of ties reduces trading costs and trading activities by connected parties. Our evidence illustrates an important and previously undocumented consequence of social ties.
Criminal Justice for All

This is a critical juncture for criminal law scholarship. It is not hyperbolic to assert that our criminal justice system is very much in crisis. Just as important, this crisis is widely acknowledged outside of the legal academy—so much so that, notwithstanding meaningful variation in how the problem is diagnosed, we see almost universal agreement throughout scholarly, popular, and political discourse: The criminal justice system needs fi xing. My aim here is not to document this need, but rather to consider the function of legal scholarship in, fi rst, exposing the limits of criminal law as it operates on the ground and, next, generating a path forward. As a starting point, we might briefl y take stock of the ongoing crisis. It turns out that much of the received wisdom upon which the criminal process relies has been undermined.1 We can usefully disaggregate contemporary criminal justice critique by observing three distinct (albeit overlapping) categories of concern. One is the concern for mass incarceration and its collateral eff ects, which is primarily—but by no means exclusively2—focused on the criminal justice system’s grossly disproportionate impact on African-American men and
Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot

The policies of a Latin American government drive food prices up; unions and neighborhood associations in the capital city organize a demonstration; the government calls in the army; many people are killed; an uneasy truce prevails. As area specialists and indeed most newspaper readers and television watchers know, such sequences of events are common in recent Latin American history.1 Such events seem familiar, not only because they appear regularly in journal articles, in books, in headlines, and on the evening news, but also because they can be easily fitted into plausible narrative frames. The actors (desperately poor masses, unresponsive governing elites) are well known, and they are engaged in a common sort of conflict (debates in public arenas over economic policies). The opening event in the narrative, a sudden rise in food prices, can be understood as one of the natural vicissitudes of an underdeveloped economy. Most readers, accustomed to hearing of such occurrences, would not be likely to question the direct links from the first event to the second, the public expression of political discontent, and then to the third, the repression by the government. This article examines one such set of events, which took place in Santiago, Chile in 1905, and compares it to food riots in other parts of the world. The analysis draws both on ways in which these events resemble other food riots and on ways in which they differ from them. The claims of the urban poor in this instance to have a right to subsistence and the rejection of these claims by elites are familiar to students of food riots in other parts of the world. The linkages among the three events in Chile in 1905, though, are less typical, for three reasons. First, the rise in food prices is a puzzling trigger of the riot, since the policy that caused the prices to increase took place years before the demonstrations and repression. Second, the foodstuff that was in dispute was not a common grain such as wheat or rice that provides the bulk of subsistence and whose price and availability form the key issues in most food riots, but meat, a luxury item that formed a small portion of the diet of much of the population of Chile at the time. Finally, the link between the protest demonstration and the repression is complex rather
Ontological Meta-Analysis and Synthesis

We present ontological meta-analysis and synthesis as a method for reviewing, mapping, and visualizing the research literature in a domain cumulatively, logically, systematically, and systemically. The method will highlight the domain‟s bright spots which are heavily emphasized, the light spots which are lightly emphasized, the blank spots which are not emphasized, and the blind spots which have been overlooked. It will highlight the biases and asymmetries in the domain‟s research; the research can then be realigned to make it stronger and more effective. We illustrate the method using the emerging domain of Public Health Informatics (PHI). We present an ontological framework for the domain, map the literature onto the framework, and highlight its bright, light, and blank/blind spots. We conclude with a discussion of how (a) the results can be used to realign PHI research, and (b) the method can be used in other information systems domains.
“I Think They Discriminated Against Me”: Using Prototype Theory and Organizational Justice Theory for Understanding Perceived Discrimination in Selection and Promotion Situations

Research in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology has generally focused on objective measures of employment discrimination and has virtually neglected individuals’ subjective perceptions as to whether a selection or promotion process is discriminatory or not. This paper presents two theoretical models as organizing frameworks to explain candidates’ likelihood of perceiving that discrimination has occurred in a certain selection or promotion situation. The prototype model stresses the importance of the prototypical victim-perpetrator combination, the perceived intention of the decision-maker, and the perceived harm caused as possible antecedents of perceived employment discrimination. In the organizational justice model, procedural, informational, interpersonal, and distributive fairness play a central role in determining candidates’ perceptions of discrimination. The fairness heuristic helps to explain which type of fairness information dominates these perceptions. Applications and research propositions are discussed as well as the similarities and differences between the two models. We conclude by offering several factors that may determine which model is used in deciding whether or not discrimination has occurred.
A GENERAL DOUBLE ROBUSTNESS RESULT FOR ESTIMATING AVERAGE TREATMENT EFFECTS

In this paper we study doubly robust estimators of various average and quantile treatment effects under unconfoundedness; we also consider an application to a setting with an instrumental variable. We unify and extend much of the recent literature by providing a very general identification result which covers binary and multi-valued treatments; unnormalized and normalized weighting; and both inverse-probability weighted (IPW) and doubly robust estimators. We also allow for subpopulation-specific average treatment effects where subpopulations can be based on covariate values in an arbitrary way. Similar to Wooldridge (2007), we then discuss estimation of the conditional mean using quasi-log likelihoods (QLL) from the linear exponential family.
The Idiosyncratic Volatility Puzzle: Time Trend or Speculative Episodes?

Campbell, Lettau, Malkiel, and Xu (2001) document a positive trend in idiosyncratic volatility during the 1962--1997 period. We show that by 2003 volatility falls back to pre-1990s levels. Furthermore, we show that the increase and subsequent reversal is concentrated among firms with low stock prices and high retail ownership. This evidence suggests that the increase in idiosyncratic volatility through the 1990s was not a time trend but, rather, an episodic phenomenon, at least partially associated with retail investors. Results from cross-sectional regressions, conditional trend estimation, stock-split events, and "attention-grabbing" events are consistent with a retail trading effect. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
When economic reform is faster than statistical reform - measuring and explaining inequality in rural China

Official tabulations from household survey data suggest rising income inequality in post-reform rural China, a trend of public concern. But the structural changes in China's rural economy have not been properly reflected in the methods used to process raw survey data. Using micro data from four provinces, the authors find that two-thirds of the conventionally measured increase in inequality in 1985-90 vanishes when market-based valuation methods are used and allowances are made for regional cost-of-living differences. The data revisions also suggest somewhat different explanations for rising inequality. Nonfarm income was secondary to grain production. While access to farm land was relatively equal, higher returns to land over time were inequality-increasing. But holding other factors constant, lower returns to physical capital reduced inequality over time, as did private transfers.