cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Neoliberal Penality: A Brief Genealogy

The turn of the twenty first century witnessed important shifts in punishment practices. The most shocking is mass incarceration - the exponential rise in prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries and in county jails beginning in 1973. It is tempting to view these developments as evidence of something new that emerged in the 1970s - of a new culture of control, a new penology, or a new turn to biopower. But it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the 1970s since most of the recent trends have antecedents and parallels in the early twentieth century. It is important, instead, to explore the arc of penality over a longer course: to relate recent developments to their earlier kin at the turn of the twentieth century. What that larger perspective reveals is that the pattern of confinement and control in the past century has been facilitated by the emergence and gradual dominance of neoliberal penality. By neoliberal penality, I have in mind a form of rationality in which the penal sphere is pushed outside political economy and serves the function of a boundary: the penal sanction is marked off from the dominant logic of classical economics as the only space where order is legitimately enforced by the state. This essay traces a genealogy of neoliberal penality going back to the emergence and triumph of the idea of natural order in economic thought - back to the Physiocratic writings of Francois Quesnay and other economists during the 1760s. It is precisely their notion of natural order that metamorphosed, over time, into the modern idea of market efficiency that is at the heart of neoliberal penality.
What will happen to financial markets when the baby boomers retire

This paper explores whether changes in the age distribution have significant effects on financial markets that are rational and forward-looking. It presents a stationary overlapping generations model in which agents save for retirement while working, making a portfolio decision over risky equity and riskless bonds in zero net supply. The model features only aggregate uncertainty, a technology shock to production and random population growth, and is solved numerically using the parameterized expectations approach (PEA) following Den Haan and Marcet (1990). The methodology of Den Haan and Marcet (1994) is used to test the accuracy of the solution. Although agents' degree of risk aversion is constant over time, they invest as if increasingly risk averse with age: young workers short the riskless asset in order to hold equity, while old workers hold mostly the riskless asset. This portfolio behavior stems from an implicit holding of a nontradable asset, human capital. Using the PEA solution to simulate a baby boom-baby bust reveals that the return differential between equity and bonds rises significantly when boom turns to bust. At this point a large cohort of old workers trades with a smaller cohort of young workers, resulting in excess demand for the riskless asset, which pushes down the riskfree rate relative to the return on equity. There is thus cohort-specific demographic risk in financial markets that are rational and forward-looking, with returns to baby boomers significantly below steady state returns. The paper also demonstrates that a simple pay-as-you-go pension scheme fails to insure agents against this cohort-specific risk, concluding that only government can insure agents against it, by varying borrowing over time and thereby making transfers of wealth across non-overlapping generations.An appendix solves the model using a "projection" PEA, which uses a nonlinear equation solver to find the coefficients at which the approximating function equals the numerically computed conditional expectation. It compares the efficiency and accuracy of this solution method to that of the Monte Carlo PEA.
Waging War on "Unemployables"? Race, Low-Wage Work, and Minimum Wages: The New Evidence

Capturing both popular and academic imaginations, recent literature contributions contest the standard treatment of minimum wage statutes as vehicles that enlarge the economic and social dislocation of vulnerable workers. A persistent strain of the current scholarship dedicated to progressive labor ideology implies that minimum wages, or, alternatively, living wage statutes, are necessary to preclude the degradation of low-wage workers. The publication of Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson's recent article, Minimum Wage Legislation, constitutes yet another effort to destabilize the neoclassical consensus that emphasizes the adverse employment effects of wage regulation. Prescinding from orthodox economic analysis, Deakin and Wilkinson insist that there is a good efficiency-based case for minimum wage legislation. If the authors are correct, and if efficiency standing alone supports their normative viewpoint, then the contention that such legislation ought to be seen as a societal good might become tenable. Unfortunately, their claims are highly doubtful. Perceived through the lenses of American labor history, classical liberalism, Critical Race Theory, and neoclassical economics, the authors' allegations signify the capitulation of reasoned analysis to ideology. Rather than supporting the interest of the public or of vulnerable workers, their starkly conventional and progressive approach to labor law reform recalls John Stuart Mill's embrace of Social Darwinism and consequent exclusion of inferior classes of workers. The authors' approach also verifies Mill's observation that modern liberal democracy-operating consistently with the goals of exclusion-is insufficient to protect disfavored groups and individuals from the coercive power authorized by a majority or its 1 Hutchison: Waging War on "Unemployables"? Race, Low-Wage Work, and Minimum W Published by Scholarly Commons at Hofstra Law, 2011 HOFSTRA LABOR & EMPLOYMENT LA WJOURNAL hierarchs. Since Deakin and Wilkinson's credulous claims are in harmony with more than a century of progressive policies, and since the normative and prudential case for raising or retaining the minimum wage remains weak, marginalized members of society have much to fear from their analysis. Minimum wage laws, . . . are often advocated by those who see themselves as taking the side of the workers against their employers, when in fact the employers may end up less harmed by such laws than are the workers themselves, whose unemployment can deprive them of both current income and the human capital that work experience could build up for them and enable them to earn higher incomes in the future. 1
Stateless Law: Kelsen’s Conception and its Limits

Hans Kelsen's claim that the state and the law are identical is surrounded by a somewhat mystical air. Yet, the 'identity thesis' loses much of its mystical aura when it is seen as an attempt to recast the state, qua social fact, in deontological terms. The state is seen as a condition necessary to account for the validity of legal acts. Indeed, the meaning of the state is reduced to the function performed by a con- ception of order in the reproduction of a system of norms. No further social fact would attest to its existence. From a sociological point of view, all law is essentially, and principally, law sans state.
Competitor Orientation: Effects of Objectives and Information on Managerial Decisions and Profitability

Managers are often advised, “beat your competitors,” which sometimes contrasts with the advice, “do the best for your firm.” This may lead managers to focus on comparative measures such as market s...
Prostitution: Facts and Fictions:

Review of several popular myths regarding prostitution, in comparison to research evidence.
Regulation, shareholder rights and corporate governance: an empirical note

We investigate the impact of regulation on shareholder rights and corporate governance. We gauge the strength of shareholder rights by measuring the number of restrictive governance provisions that suppress shareholder rights – the more restrictive the governance, the weaker the shareholder rights. We find that financial firms have less restrictive corporate governance, suggesting that financial regulations promote shareholder rights. On the other hand, regulation does not seem to impact shareholder rights in the utility industry.
The NFL Concussion Litigation: A Critical Assessment of Class Certification

Charles (“Ray”) Easterling, starting safety for the Atlanta Falcons in the 1970s, would forget the way home when jogging through his neighborhood.1 He would walk into a room and forget why he was there.2 He would experience severe mood swings and depression.3 In August 2011, Easterling4 filed one of the first lawsuits against the National Football League (NFL), asserting that the NFL concealed the long-term effects of on-field head injury and failed to warn players of the risks of harm from repeated concussions.5 As of October 2, 2012, more than 155 similar cases on behalf of thousands of former players have been consolidated in a multi-district litigation case (MDL) in federal district court in Pennsylvania.6 The consolidated mega-case seeks, among other things, to certify a national class of “[a]ll retired or former NFL professional football players who reside in the United States, who are not now salaried employees of the NFL or any mem-
Land Ownership Risk and Urban Development

Under certainty, unlimited duration of private ownership of land provides landowners with efficient development incentives. However, in cases of ownership risk arising from title mistakes, fraud, boundary encroachment, or adverse possession, the statute of limitations sets a limit on how long agents have to establish or defend an ownership claim. This paper demonstrates that such restrictions speed the pace of land development and systematically affect the development density according to site location in the urban land market. It also offers an explanation of why land owners prefer a time limit on the ability to defend their ownership. It shows that the value–maximizing statute varies across sites in the spatial market.
Global Transmission of Interest Rates: Monetary Independence and Currency Regime

The authors empirically study the sensitivity of local interest rates to international interest rates and how that sensitivity is affected by a country's choice of exchange rate regime. To establish the empirical regularities, they use a reduced-form empirical approach to compute both panel and single-country estimates of interest rate sensitivity for a large sample of developing and industrial economies between 1970 and 1999. When using the full sample, they find that: 1) Interest rates are typically lower in economies with fixed exchange rates than in those with flexible exchange rates. 2) More rigid currency regimes tend to exhibit higher transmission than more flexible regimes. In many cases in the 1990s, however, the authors cannot reject full transmission (a slope coefficient equal to 1), even for several countries with floating regimes. The data suggest an upward time trend in the degree to which domestic interest rates are sensitive to international capital movements and developing economies' increased financial integration with the rest of the world. As a result, country-specific estimates for the 1990s reveal few cases of less-than-full transmission of international interest rates to domestic rates, regardless of the currency regime. Country-specific results suggest that only large industrial countries can (or choose to) benefit from independent monetary policy. During the 1990s, interest rates in European countries were fully sensitive to German interest rates but insensitive to U.S. interest rates.
Aristotle on the Virtue of the Multitude

It is generally believed that one argument advanced by Aristotle in favor of the political authority of the multitude is that large groups can make better decisions by pooling their knowledge than individuals or small groups can make alone. This is supported by two analogies, one apparently involving a “potluck dinner” and the other aesthetic judgment. This article suggests that that interpretation of Aristotle’s argument is implausible given the historical context and several features of the text. It argues that Aristotle’s support for the rule of the multitude rested not on its superior knowledge but rather on his belief that the virtue of individuals can be aggregated and even amplified when they act collectively. This significantly alters our understanding of Aristotle’s political thought and presents a powerful alternative to the epistemic defenses of mass political activity popular today.
Rare Disasters, Asset Prices, and Welfare Costs

A representative-consumer model with Epstein-Zin-Weil preferences and i.i.d. shocks, including rare disasters, accords with observed equity premia and risk-free rates if the coefficient of relative risk aversion equals 3-4. If the intertemporal elasticity of substitution exceeds one, an increase in uncertainty lowers the price-dividend ratio for equity, and a rise in the expected growth rate raises this ratio. Calibrations indicate that society would willingly reduce GDP by around 20 percent each year to eliminate rare disasters. The welfare cost from usual economic fluctuations is much smaller, though still important, corresponding to lowering GDP by about 1.5 percent each year.
Waiting to Exhale?: Global Warming and Tax Policy

Introduction: Global Warming, Energy Policy, Tax Policy 1136 I. Global Warming 1141 A. Evidence and Consequences 1141 B. International Response 1147 1. The Kyoto Protocol 1147 2. Why the United States resists GHG regulation .........1148 II. Tax Policy and Global Warming 1162 A. Energy 1162 1. Vice President Cheney’s report 1162 2. Present law 1164 3. Recent legislative proposals 1168 B. Forests 1174 1. Benefits 1174 2. Capacity 1176 3. Forest conservation 1178 a. History 1179 b. Value of timber 1180 c. Ownership of forestland 1183 1) Public forests 1184 2) Private forests 1188 4. Taxation of timber 1190 a. Preferential capital gains treatment 1190 b. Taxation of timber expenses 1192 c. Incentives for conservation 1194 1) Present law 1194
Product competitiveness and beating analyst earnings target

While Wall Street closely watches financial analysts’ earnings forecasts, Main Street often scrutinizes product quality relative to competition. Do firms with superior product competitiveness enjoy greater likelihood of beating analyst earnings target? And if so, is there contingency in this impact? We show that positive changes in product competitiveness contribute to the firm’s likelihood of beating analyst earnings target, while negative changes in product competitiveness account for missed earnings target. In addition, this impact of product competitiveness on the likelihood of beating analyst earnings target is more positive in the situations of high firm future growth opportunity and low financial environment uncertainty. These findings innovatively use analyst forecast metrics to reinforce the relationship between product quality, competitive advantage, and financial performance. Our study also cultivates a contingency theory of the marketing-finance interface and allows marketing and finance executives to find common ground in strategic discourse. Overall, this research offers brand new financial analysts-based implications of product competitiveness.
South African Riots: Repercussion of the Global Food Crisis and US Drought

High and volatile global food prices have led to food riots and played a critical role in triggering the Arab Spring revolutions in recent years. The severe drought in the USA in the summer of 2012 led to a new increase in food prices. Through the fall, they remained at a threshold above which the riots and revolutions had predominantly occurred. Global prices at this level create conditions where an exacerbating local circumstance can trigger unrest. Global corn (maize) prices reached new highs, and countries that depend mostly on maize are more likely to experience high local food prices and associated pressures toward social unrest. Here we analyze the conditions in South Africa, which is a heavily maize-dependent country, and we find that consumer food indices have increased dramatically. Coinciding with the food price increases this summer, massive labor strikes in mining and agriculture have led to the greatest single incident of social violence since the fall of apartheid in 1994. Worker demands for dramatic pay increases reflect that their wages have not kept up with drastic increases in the prices of necessities, especially food. Without attention to the global food price situation, more incidents of food-based social instability are likely to arise. Other countries that have manifested food-related protests and riots in 2012 include Haiti (prior to the impact of Hurricane Sandy) and Argentina. Moreover, these cases of unrest are just the most visible symptom of widespread suffering of poor populations worldwide due to elevated food prices. Our analysis has shown that policy decisions that would directly impact food prices are decreasing the conversion of maize to ethanol in the USA, and reimposing regulations on commodity futures markets to prevent excessive speculation, which we have shown causes bubbles and crashes in these markets. Absent such policy actions, governments and companies should track and mitigate the impact of high and volatile food prices on citizens and employees.
Auctions with a buy price

eBay and Yahoo allow sellers to list their auctions with a buy price at which a bidder may purchase the item immediately. On eBay, the buy-now option disappears once a bid is placed, while on Yahoo the buy-now option remains in effect throughout the auction. We show that when bidders are risk averse, both types of auctions raise seller revenue for a wide range of buy prices. The Yahoo format raises more revenue than the eBay format when bidders have either CARA or DARA. Bidders with DARA prefer the eBay auction, while bidders with CARA are indifferent between the two.
ABORTION AND CRIME: UNWANTED CHILDREN AND OUT‐OF‐WEDLOCK BIRTHS

Abortion may prevent the birth of "unwanted" children, who would have relatively small investments in human capital and a higher probability of crime. On the other hand, some research suggests that legalizing abortion increases out-of-wedlock births and single parent families, which implies the opposite impact on investments in human capital and thus crime. The question is: what is the net impact? We find evidence that legalizing abortion increased murder rates by around about 0.5 to 7 percent. Previous estimates are shown to suffer from not directly linking the cohorts who are committing crime with whether they had been born before or after abortion was legal. Lott, John R. and Whitley, John E., Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births (April 30, 2001). Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=270126 or doi:10.2139/ssrn.270126
Safer ratios, riskier portfolios: Banks' response to government aid

Abstract Using novel data on bank applications to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), we study the effect of government assistance on bank risk taking. Bailed-out banks initiate riskier loans and shift assets toward riskier securities after receiving government support. However, this shift in risk occurs mostly within the same asset class and, therefore, remains undetected by regulatory capital ratios, which indicate improved capitalization at bailed-out banks. Consequently, these banks appear safer according to regulatory ratios, but show an increase in volatility and default risk. These findings are robust to controlling for credit demand and account for selection of TARP recipients by exploiting banks׳ geography-based political connections as an instrument for bailout approvals.
Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence on Poverty from India

This paper uses the 1991 Indian trade liberalization to measure the impact of trade liberalization on poverty, and to examine the mechanisms underpinning this impact. Variation in sectoral composition across districts and liberalization intensity across production sectors allows a difference-in-difference approach. Rural districts, in which production sectors more exposed to liberalization were concentrated, experienced slower decline in poverty and lower consumption growth. The impact of liberalization was most pronounced among the least geographically mobile at the bottom of the income distribution, and in Indian states where inflexible labor laws impeded factor reallocation across sectors.
What Mistake Of Law Just Might Be: Legal Moralism, Liberal Positivism, And The Mistake Of Law Doctrine

This Article examines and evaluates a distinctive, increasingly popular account of the Mistake of Law doctrine. The doctrine, deeply ingrained in American criminal law, is at the same time notoriously unclear in its scope, content, and application. A growing number of legal theorists have criticized the traditional interpretation of the doctrine; legal moralists in particular have argued that this account is conceptually confused. Because the doctrine’s use of a strict liability punishment regime does not incentivize individuals to learn the law as well as a negligence regime might, legal moralists argue that the doctrine cannot be explained by a desire to incentivize legal knowledge. In evaluating this argument, the Article defends the traditional account, often identified with the liberal positivism of Justice Holmes. The Article advances three main arguments. First, legal moralism’s claim that a negligence standard is more effective than a strict liability standard in incentivizing individuals to learn the law is false: the safe harbor provision of a negligence rule acts as an insurance effect, disincentivizing individuals to learn the law. Second, legal moralism assumes that the moral content of the criminal law is determinate, and that agents have perfectly rational, objective motivational sets. These are illicit assumptions that result in a flawed argument. Finally, the Article contends that legal moralism misinterprets the structural core of the traditional account: properly understood, the Mistake of Law doctrine employs a negligence–strict liability hybrid, and is thus more sophisticated than legal moralists realize. The Article concludes that, contrary to what a surprising number of criminal law theorists have come to accept, legal moralism fails to make a plausible case against the traditional account of the Mistake of Law doctrine.
The structure of information release and the factor structure of returns

Abstract We model how firms releasing information on different dates causes the CAPM to fail, requiring an additional factor based on the information structure to price assets. We exemplify this mechanism’s empirical relevance using quarterly earnings announcements, which cluster across months along size and book-to-market. Seventy percent of the alpha reduction from including SMB and HML occurs in the four main earnings announcement months. The information structure factor accounts for all of SMB and HML’s seasonal alpha reduction and one third of their overall alpha reduction. Controlling for size and book-to-market, exposures to SMB and HML vary with firms’ earnings announcement month.
Gender, Discourse, and Customary Law in Africa

Around the world, efforts by states to accommodate cultural pluralism vary in form and vigor. Some multiculturalist states cede to cultural minorities the authority to govern in certain substantive areas, such as family law. Not surprisingly, feminists have raised concerns that a state’s reluctance to govern in areas traditionally seen as “private,” and leaving those areas of law to customary legal systems, leaves women within those minority communities vulnerable to discrimination. Many women value cultural identity, even as they work to eliminate discrimination within their cultural communities. The international human rights community, however, has not always viewed women as committed, active members of their cultural communities. By viewing African women almost exclusively as victims of their culture, the international human rights community has historically undervalued the potential for African women to reformulate cultural policies within their communities. The two primary human rights treaties for the promotion of gender equality in Africa, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights are dismissive of culture and gender equality, respectively. The Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa attempts to remedy the shortcomings of CEDAW and the African Charter and offers new hope for promoting gender equality on the continent. In addition to strong substantive rights, the Protocol provides important procedural rights to ensure that women have a voice in the ongoing examination and reformulation of cultural practices and customary law.
Women's Reproductive Rights as a Political Price of Post-communist Transformation in Poland

Following Poland’s change of regime in 1989, the country enacted Europe’s most restrictive legislation on reproductive rights and steadily tightened this regime ever since. Later, a liberal Polish government was presented with the choice between liberalizing abortion law or Catholic Church support for the referendum to join the European Union. This article discusses the genesis and background of Polish law on reproductive rights in the context of public health as well as its enforcement, its near-irreconcilable conflicts with international human rights law and established precedent. It examines the economics of abortion and analyses the interests of politicians, the clergy and health care professionals.
Market Reactions to Export Subsidies

Abstract This paper analyzes the economic impact of export subsidies by investigating stock price reactions to a critical event in 1997. On November 18, 1997, the European Union announced its intention to file a complaint before the World Trade Organization (WTO), arguing that the United States provided American exporters illegal subsidies by permitting them to use Foreign Sales Corporations to exempt a fraction of export profits from taxation. Share prices of American exporters fell sharply on this news, and its implication that the WTO might force the United States to eliminate the subsidy, which happened in 2004. The share price declines were largest for exporters with high profit margins and those whose tax situations made the threatened export subsidy particularly valuable. This evidence suggests that export subsidies do not merely benefit foreign consumers, but also improve the profitability of exporters, particularly those earning rents in imperfectly competitive markets.
THE INTELLECTUAL STRUCTURE OF SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: A BIBLIOMETRIC APPROACH

Insights into supply chain management's (SCM's) cross-disciplinary nature, emerging trends, and theory status should be available through study of SCM literature intellectual structure. Bibliometrics quantitatively examine a large body of academic literature to assess the state of SCM theory development. Bibliometrics establish a baseline for supply chain through evolution tracking through SCM literature intellectual structure identification at a single point of time. Bibliometrics also makes the growing diversity of interest in supply chain concepts and theory more obvious through SCM publication trend examination across journals and time.
Considering concessions: A survey experiment on the Colombian peace process:

Designing peace agreements that can be signed and sustained can be difficult in civil conflict. Many recent cases of successful settlements include electoral provisions, often for rebel groups to p...
How Words and Money Cultivate a Personal Vote: The Effect of Legislator Credit Claiming on Constituent Credit Allocation

the district—affect how constituents allocate credit. Legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district. Constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages—they build more support than other nonpartisan messages. But contrary to expectations from other studies, constituents are more responsive to the total number of messages sent rather than the amount claimed. Our results have broad implications for political representation, the personal vote, and the study of U.S. Congressional elections. P articularistic spending, a large literature argues, cultivates a personal vote for incumbents (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987; Ferejohn 1974;LazarusandReiley2010;LevittandSnyder1997; Mayhew 1974). To build this support, legislators are assumed to direct projects and programs to their districts. Constituents, in turn, are thought to reward their legislator for the level of federal spending in the district (Levitt and Snyder 1997; Str¨ omberg 2004) or the
New Product Search Over Time: Past Ideas in Their Prime?

This study is an investigation of how the age of the knowledge that firms search affects how innovative they are. Two seemingly contradictory propositions are examined: (1) old knowledge hurts by m...
The effect of securities litigation on external financing

Abstract Using a comprehensive sample of securities litigation, we examine the effect of financial fraud on the subsequent use of external financing. We find that firms with a recent history of securities litigation, particularly more severe litigation, are less likely to seek external debt and equity financing. This negative relationship between prior litigation and external financing is stronger for firms with high information asymmetry. Furthermore, firms significantly reduce their investments in capital expenditures and research and development during the three years following a litigation filing. Thus, the reduction in the availability of external financing due to allegations of financial fraud can have a tangible impact upon the investment opportunities of the firm.
The Effect of Leverage on Bidding Behavior: Theory and Evidence from the FCC Auctions

This is an exploration of how bidding behavior of firms in various auctions is affected by their capital structure. The theoretical model considers a first-price sealed bid and an English auction. We find that as debt levels increase, firms tend to reduce their bids. The lower bids give the competition incentives to reduce their bids as well. These results are investigated empirically using data from the 1994--1995 FCC spectrum auctions. Consistent with the theoretical model, higher debt levels of the bidding firm and of the competition tend to lead to lower bids. Additional determinants of bidding behavior in these auctions are also analyzed. Copyright 2002, Oxford University Press.
THE CENTRAL-BANK BALANCE SHEET AS AN INSTRUMENT OF MONETARY POLICY

While many analyses of monetary policy consider only the adjustment of a central bank’s target for a short-term nominal interest rate, other dimensions of policy have recently been of greater importance: changes in the supply of bank reserves beyond those required to achieve an interest-rate target, changes in the assets acquired by central banks, and changes in the interest rate paid on reserves. We extend a standard New Keynesian model to allow a role for the central bank’s balance sheet in equilibrium determination, and consider the connections between these alternative dimensions of policy and traditional interest-rate policy. We distinguish between \quantitative easing" in the strict sense and targeted asset purchases by a central bank, and argue that while the former is likely be inefiective at all times, the latter dimension of policy can be efiective when flnancial markets are su‐ciently disrupted. Neither is a perfect substitute for conventional interest-rate policy, but purchases of illiquid assets are particularly likely to improve welfare when the zero lower bound on the policy rate is reached. We also consider optimal policy with regard to the payment of interest on reserves, and argue that the interest rate on reserves should be kept near the central bank’s target for the policy rate at all times.
Understanding Bank Runs: The Importance of Depositor-Bank Relationships and Networks

We use a unique, new, database to examine micro depositor level data for a bank that faced a run. We use minute-by-minute depositor withdrawal data to understand the effectiveness of deposit insurance, the role of social networks, and the importance of bank-depositor relationships in influencing depositor propensity to run. We employ methods from the epidemiology literature which examine how diseases spread to estimate transmission probabilities of depositors running, and the significant underlying factors. We find that deposit insurance is only partially effective in preventing bank runs. Further, our results suggest that social network effects are important but are mitigated by other factors, in particular the length and depth of the bank-depositor relationship. Depositors with longer relationships and those who have availed of loans from a bank are less likely to run during a crisis, suggesting that cross-selling acts not just as a revenue generator but also as a complementary insurance mechanism for the bank. Finally, we find there are long term effects of a solvent bank run in that depositors who run do not return back to the bank. Our results help understand the underlying dynamics of bank runs and hold important policy implications.
Does the Rule of Reason Violate the Rule of Law

In the past few years, the Supreme Court has been more active in deciding antitrust issues. The Court’s choice of legal standards affects future market behavior and the incentives for individuals and organizations to engage in productive activity. Over the past thirty years, the Court has primarily relied upon the rule-of-reason standard — a fact-specific inquiry into whether a restraint of trade is “unreasonable.” But despite its increased activity, the Court never assesses the deficiencies of this standard under rule-of-law principles. That assessment is critical. This Article analyzes the rule-of-reason standard’s significant deficiencies, and how these deficiencies adversely affect antitrust enforcement and competition policy generally. Because perfect compliance with rule-of-law ideals, however, may be unobtainable and undesirable, this Article recommends several improvements to reorient the rule of reason closer to rule-of-law ideals.
JILA SrI Optical Lattice Clock with Uncertainty of $2.0 \times 10^{-18}$

We report on an improved systematic evaluation of the JILA SrI optical lattice clock, achieving a nearly identical uncertainty compared to the previous strontium record set by the JILA SrII optical lattice clock at 2.1 × 10−18. This improves upon the previous evaluation of the JILA SrI optical lattice clock in 2013, and we achieve a more than twenty-fold reduction in systematic uncertainty to 2.0 × 10−18. A seven-fold improvement in clock stability, reaching 4.8 × 10−17/ √τ for an averaging time τ in seconds, allows the clock to average to its systematic uncertainty in under 10min. We improve the systematic uncertainty budget in several important ways. This includes a novel scheme for taming blackbody radiation-induced frequency shifts through active stabilization and characterization of the thermal environment, inclusion of higher-order terms in the lattice light shift, and updated atomic coefficients. Along with careful control of other systematic effects, we achieve low temporal drift of systematic offsets and high uptime of the clock. We additionally present an improved evaluation of the second order Zeeman coefficient that is applicable to all Sr optical lattice clocks. These improvements in performance have enabled several important studies including frequency ratio measurements through the boulder area clock optical network (BACON), a high precision comparison with the JILA 3D lattice clock, a demonstration of a new all-optical time scale combining SrI and a cryogenic silicon cavity, and a high sensitivity search for ultralight scalar dark matter.
An alternative test of the trade-off theory of capital structure

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the stochastic behavior of corporate debt ratios utilizing a balanced panel of 2,556 publicly traded U.S. firms during the period 1997-2010. We partition the panel into ten economic sectors and perform panel unit root tests on each sector employing book value and market value measures of debt ratio. First-generation panel unit root tests provide consistent evidence that debt ratios are mean reverting, which supports the trade-off theory. However, these tests rely on the assumption that the debt ratios are cross-sectionally independent, but tests of cross-sectional independence fail to uphold this assumption. Thus, utilizing a second-generation panel unit root test that controls for cross-sectional dependence, we uncover evidence showing that debt ratios are not mean reverting, which contradicts the trade-off hypothesis. We find that the recent macroeconomic developments triggered by the financial crisis and the Great Recession have considerable explanatory power over the dynamics of the debt ratios. In fact, when we exclude the years of the recent global financial crisis, the unit root hypothesis is rejected in one half of the sectors. We interpret these results as indicative that the recent global events may have produced in these sectors a structural change in the underlying data generation process (DGP). Overall, then, we find mixed evidence on the stationarity of debt ratios.
Donabedian's Legacy: The Future of Health Care Quality Law and Policy

Asked to imagine the next twenty-five years of quality-related health care law, the author decided to tackle a somewhat different question: Given the path that health care law and policy has taken in reaching its current form, what is its likely future trajectory? Parts I and II of this article trace the evolution of both health care quality law and quality-related legal scholarship. It was not until the 1970s and early 1980s that a few legal scholars, motivated in part by federal reform efforts directed at controlling costs, began to take a more comprehensive look at mechanisms for quality related oversight. By the 1980s, the focus on quality, as opposed to just competence, began to intensify as a result of a growing commitment to evidence-based medicine, a firmer analytic foundation for assessing quality, and rapidly accumulating documentation of deficiencies in care. The trend toward quality measurement that began to accelerate 25 years ago continues today, evolving in ways that help address concerns raised by legal scholars writing at an earlier stage of the evolution. Part III of this article discusses continuing challenges in quality-related regulation and considers how quality measurement could help support continued improvement of the health care system, including through more systematic tracking of the impacts of health system interventions.
The New Moral Turpitude Test: Failing Chevron Step Zero

In the waning days of the Bush administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey decided In re Silva-Trevino, in which he reversed over a century of immigration law precedent by creating a new moral turpitude test. He abandoned the well-entrenched “categorical approach,” the mechanism by which immigration judges decide whether a noncitizen is removable for a criminal conviction, and allowed judges to engage in a factual inquiry of whether an offense involves moral turpitude. The Attorney General made such a broad, sweeping change through a process that allowed no input from affected parties, including the individual whose case became the new precedent. In this article, I argue that courts should refuse deference to Silva-Trevino under “Chevron step zero.” Chevron, U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC introduced a well-known two-step analysis for courts to determine whether an agency’s decision deserved deference: first, courts determine whether Congress used clear language in the statute; second, if Congress was not clear, courts defer to the agency’s reasonable interpretation. The Court later introduced what scholars call “Chevron step zero.” In an important step zero decision, the Court decided United States v. Mead Corp., holding that courts should not defer to agency interpretations of law issued through informal procedures because such interpretations do not have the force of law. I argue that courts should not defer to Silva-Trevino under Chevron step zero because the Attorney General did not decide the case using law-like procedures: the decision-making process demonstrated neither transparency nor careful consideration. THE NEW MORAL TURPITUDE TEST: FAILING
Are Legislation and Rules a Problem in Law - Thoughts on the Work of Joseph Vining

Written for a conference at Villanova Law School held to celebrate and explore the work of Joseph Vining over forty years, this paper considers the adequacy of Vining’s phenomenology of law. Specifically, it inquires into the accuracy of Vining’s startling claims that “legislation is a problem in law, not central to law” and “rules are nowhere to be found” in law. The argument of the paper is that when – but only when – law is understood to be an ordinance of reason in the mind of him or them who have care of the community, for the common good, and promulgated, is legislation not a problem in law. Such an ordinance is not a problem, but in fact a very good thing, exactly because by it the ruling authority leads the people to their common good. The practical problem comes in framing ordinances that in fact live up to this definition, and for this regnative prudence is required. But the formation of such prudence, the paper also argues, is not itself a lawless enterprise. In the natural law tradition, the human project of making law is itself understood to be ruled by higher law. The paper concludes by asking whether Vining’s account of law is ultimately lawless. Vining, like Judge Noonan, understands the making of law to be, at its best, a response to persons. The paper contends that the all-important question, much mooted in modernity and not directly faced by Vining, is whether persons are themselves naturally under law, such that they can proceed to make more law on the basis of it. It is not clear how lawless persons can proceed to make law that is anything but arbitrary, yet it is clear that Vining denies that the arbitrary is law.
The Dark Side of Commodification Critiques: Politics and Elitism in Standardized Testing

In Testing as Commodification, Katharine Silbaugh argues that debates within the standardized testing literature represent a split similar to the one witnessed in traditional debates on the commodifying effects of market exchange: those who extol the virtues of a common metric by which to make comparisons and evaluations, on the one hand, versus those who argue that test scores have swallowed other notions of the public good in education, on the other. 1 Though the analogy is imperfect, as Silbaugh acknowledges, I agree that the objections to markets and to standardized testing are sufficiently similar to render the comparison fruitful. However, the analogy shows more than Silbaugh acknowledges. Whereas Silbaugh concludes that her comparison demonstrates the failure of standardized testing, I contend that it primarily demonstrates the politically driven and elitist nature of much of the standardized testing debate. Politics and elitism in commodification-like protests to standardized testing should not be terribly surprising. Almost since their inception, commodification objections have held an elitist flavor and—because they are more likely to resonate with audiences than narrower appeals to self-interest—have been invoked for political gains. If standardized testing debates bear similarities to market commodification debates, it is only natural that the parallels extend to these traits as well. Part I isolates three conceptions of commodification identifiable in the literature on markets—cognitive (or value) incommensurability, constitutive incommensurability, and corruption
God and the Executioner: The Influence of Western Religion on the Use of the Death Penalty

The attitude of religious groups towards the use of capital punishment has ebbed and flowed throughout history. This essay contains an historical review of religious attitudes towards capital punishment and the influence of those attitudes on the state’s use of the death penalty.The Christian Church has expressed strong support for capital punishment throughout most of its history, but in recent decades, opposition to the death penalty within the Catholic Church and many Protestant groups has emerged. The same is true with Judaism.Despite this recent abolitionist sentiment from an array of religious institutions, there has been a divergence of opinion between the "pulpit and the pew" as the laity in the United States continues to support the death penalty in large numbers. This divergence is due in part to the declining influence of religious organizations over the social policy choices of their members. Consequently, the fate of the death penalty in the United States will most likely be resolved in the realm of the secular rather than the sacred.
Redefining Prey and Predator in Class Actions

Aggregate litigation’s potential as a tool for the disempowered is not being realized. Class actions have come under serious attack in the last decade as critics have successfully worked to change traditional notions of victimhood. The leading narrative identifies big businesses as the vulnerable prey needing protection from large class claims and the greedy class actions attorneys who bring them. Relying on this narrative, courts and Congress have made class actions harder to pursue, from filing and class certification to settlement approval. Vulnerability theory offers an alternative framework to rehabilitate class actions. From this perspective, the legal system currently disadvantages consumers. Without more balanced class action procedures, these vulnerable subjects have little realistic economic means to judicial access. This, in turn, further empowers corporate defendants by under-enforcement of the substantive legal theories most-often pursued as class claims, impacting overall social and economic well-being. The ambitious goal of this Article is to describe vulnerability theory and its intersection with class actions. Part I provides a foundational understanding of vulnerability theory. Part II maps out a narrative shift in the legal literature that downplays class actions as a way to empower the unempowered and instead emphasizes the need to protect potential defendants. Part III highlights how battles over narratives have consequences. In class actions, the narrative shift means courts are ignoring the disadvantages consumers face in bringing claims, including financial, informational, and judicial favoritism challenges. Part IV, using vulnerability theory, explain how class actions offer consumers resiliency tools. Enhancing these resiliency tools provides a new direction for class action reform that redefines prey and predator.