cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Optimal partnership contracts: Foundation and duality

We use the duality in linear programming to solve the problem of optimal contracts with moral hazards. We show the importance of allowing the partners to throw away outputs under some contingencies. A two-step procedure is used to find the optimal contracts. The first step minimizes the loss from undistributed outputs, and in the second step, a second best solution is found. A characterization of the optimal contracts in 2-by-2-by-2 partnership games is offered. Such contracts implement an optimal strategy profile which either has no incentive cost to implement or is near a pure strategy profile.
Examining the Relationship Between Reviews and Sales: The Role of Reviewer Identity Disclosure in Electronic Markets

Consumer-generated product reviews have proliferated online, driven by the notion that consumers' decision to purchase or not purchase a product is based on the positive or negative information about that product they obtain from fellow consumers. Using research on information processing as a foundation, we suggest that in the context of an online community, reviewer disclosure of identity-descriptive information is used by consumers to supplement or replace product information when making purchase decisions and evaluating the helpfulness of online reviews. Using a unique data set based on both chronologically compiled ratings as well as reviewer characteristics for a given set of products and geographical location-based purchasing behavior from Amazon, we provide evidence that community norms are an antecedent to reviewer disclosure of identity-descriptive information. Online community members rate reviews containing identity-descriptive information more positively, and the prevalence of reviewer disclosure of identity information is associated with increases in subsequent online product sales. In addition, we show that shared geographical location increases the relationship between disclosure and product sales, thus highlighting the important role of geography in electronic commerce. Taken together, our results suggest that identity-relevant information about reviewers shapes community members' judgment of products and reviews. Implications for research on the relationship between online word-of-mouth WOM and sales, peer recognition and reputation systems, and conformity to online community norms are discussed.
Public Policy and Global Technological Integration: An Introduction

Over the past five years, the relationship between liberal international trade rules and competition law has become the subject of increasing attention from governments, the business community, and scholars. The genesis of this attention is a perception that certain major industrialized markets are protected against import penetration by the failure of national governments to police against competitive market restraints. The reduction or elimination of formal trade barriers, it is argued, does not achieve the desired result of stimulating international competition, with corollary comparative advantage effects, if markets are allocated, formally or informally, among domestic producers. In this context, competition law is viewed largely as an exporter's market access tool.Significantly less attention has been paid to the extent to which industrial and service industry concentration maybe increasing at the international level, and the role that competition law might play in addressing a pattern of concentration. Without doubt, global markets are becoming increasingly integrated through international worksharing arrangements, and this integration is taking place within largescale multinational corporate structures. Still less attention has been paid to the role of industrial or intellectual property in industrial integration and concentration.The key points are these: First, at the heart of the trend toward global technological integration is the global system for the protection of IPRs. Second, IPRs are government-granted rights, and governments are acting in the public interest. Third, the effect globalizing IPRs has on the public has never been studied in anything close to a comprehensive way, nor have alternatives to the present international IPRs protection system been seriously considered. Fourth, there is a clear intersection between IPRs protection and competition law. Competition law is designed to protect the public interest and might be used to police the international IPRs protection system. This would be in accordance with classical thinking on maintaining the integrity of markets. It would be unfortunate, however, if consideration of the effect of the international IPRs system on the public were limited to the potential utility of competition law. More innovative approaches might be worthwhile to consider.
The Dialogic Promise: Assessing the Normative Potential of Theories of Constitutional Dialogue

In recent years, the metaphor of "dialogue" has become increasingly ubiquitous within constitutional theory - both in the United States and globally - as a way of describing the nature of interactions between courts and non-judicial actors in the area of constitutional decision-making, particularly in relation to the interpretation of rights. This Article provides a critical account of theories of constitutional dialogue in order to determine which of these theories hold the greatest normative promise. Theories of dialogue face two hurdles to normative success. First, they must accomplish their goal of resolving the democratic objection to judicial review. Second, and legitimacy aside, they must be able to provide an attractive normative vision of the role of judicial review in democratic constitutionalism. This Article maintains that while theories of constitutional dialogue do make important contributions to our understanding of judicial review, most fail to provide satisfying normative visions of dialogue on these dual levels of analysis. This Article concludes that the greatest potential for achieving a normatively satisfying understanding of constitutional dialogue emerges when the contributions of equilibrium and partnership theories of dialogue are synthesized. Equilibrium theories focus on the judiciary's capacity to facilitate society-wide debate, while partnership theories draw attention to more distinct "judicial" and "legislative" functions that the different branches of government respectively perform. The dynamic fusion of these models not only makes the greatest contributions to our understanding of modern constitutionalism and the practice of judicial review, but also offers the greatest potential for designing improved dialogic constitutional systems in the future.
TALK ABOUT TALKING ABOUT CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

Constitutional theory branches into decision theory and discourse theory. The former branch concentrates on how constitutional decisions are or should be made, the latter on how constitutional issues are or should be discussed. For its part, originalism initially was promoted as a method for resolving constitutional disagreement, but it has spread into discourse theory as well. Jack Balkin’s “living originalism” illustrates this extension. This Article examines inclusive versions of originalism like Balkin’s that permit many different answers to constitutional questions. The Article then suggests pathologies associated with loose constitutional discourse in general. For instance, a large domain for constitutional discourse can crowd out nonconstitutional argument and raise the stakes of disputes in ways that discourage compromise, creativity, and trust. Under certain conditions, loose constitutional discourse is a distraction that cannot moderate societal divisions. At its worst, loose constitutional discourse retards progress toward goals that it is supposed to achieve. We still have much to learn about how constitutional discourse operates in fact and how it interacts with nonconstitutional argument. At the moment, conducting those inquiries probably is more important than producing more talk about how we ought to talk about constitutional law.
The Future of Empirical Finance

Empirical finance is in crisis. The profession’s most important discovery tool is historical simulation, and yet most backtests and time series analyses published in journals are flawed. The problem is well known to professional organizations of statisticians and mathematicians, who have publicly criticized the misuse of mathematical tools among finance researchers. In this article, the author points to three problems and proposes four practical solutions. In an attempt to overcome the challenges posed by multiple testing and selection biaes, the author emphasizes the need to move from an individual-centric to a community-driven research paradigm. Low retraction rates can be corrected through technologies that derive “peer p-values.” Stronger theoretical foundations and closer ties with financial firms would help prevent false discoveries.
How Effective Is Joint Public and Private Monitoring? The Case of the AICPA Auditor Change Notification Letter

The AICPA SEC Practice Section (SECPS) notification rule requires a member firm to notify its former client and the Chief Accountant of the SEC in writing within five business days of the date it determines the client‐auditor relationship has ended. The rule is unique because it was developed and is enforced by a private organization (the AICPA) to assist a public organization (the SEC) in fulfilling its charge of ensuring full and timely disclosure. An SECPS educational effort to make members aware of their notification responsibilities recently ended. Our paper evaluates the effectiveness of the SECPS educational effort and the SECPS notification letter. It shows that registrant as well as auditor compliance and timeliness increased during the time the notification rule has been in effect, and that the improved registrant performance is likely due in part to improved auditor performance. One implication of our study is that a disclosure requirement auditors impose upon themselves can be effective in hel...
The Economic Consequences of Rising U.S. Government Debt: Privileges at Risk

The rapidly growing federal government debt has become a concern for policy makers and the public. Yet the U.S. government has seemingly unbounded access to credit at low interest rates. Historically, Treasury yields have been below the growth rate of the economy. The paper examines the ramifications of debt financing at low interest rates. Given the short maturity of U.S. public debt – over $2.5 trillion maturing in 2010 – investor expectations are critical. Excessive debts justify reasonable doubts about solvency and monetary stability and thus undermine a financing strategy built on the perception that U.S. debt is safe.
The conjugacy problem for automorphism groups of countable homogeneous structures

We consider the conjugacy problem for the automorphism groups of a number of countable homogeneous structures. In each case we find the precise complexity of the conjugacy relation in the sense of Borel reducibility.
Exploring irregular time series through non-uniform fast Fourier transform

Most popular analysis tools on time series require the data to be taken at uniform time intervals. However, the real-world time series, such as those from financial markets, are typically taken at irregular time intervals. It is a common practice to resample or bin the irregular time series into a regular one, but there are significant limitations on this practice. For example, if one is to resample the trading activities of a stock into hourly series, then the time series can only last through the trading day, because there usually is no trading in the night. In this work, we explore the dynamics of irregular time series through a high-performance computing algorithm known as Non-Uniform Fast Fourier Transform (NUFFT).To illustrate its effectiveness, we apply NUFFT on the trading records of natural gas futures contracts for the last seven years. Tests show that NUFFT results accurately capture well-known structural features in the trading records, such as weekly and daily cycles. At the same time the results also reveal unexplored features, such as the presence of multiple power laws. In particular, we observe an emerging power law in the Fourier spectra in recent years. We also detect a strong Fourier component at the precise frequency once per minute, which implies significant automated trading activities might be triggered by clock.
Laying off credit risk: Loan sales versus credit default swaps

After making a loan, a bank nds out if the loan needs contract enforcement (\monitoring"); it also decides whether to lay o credit risk in order to release costly capital. A bank can lay o credit risk by either selling the loan or by buying insurance through a credit default swap (CDS). With a CDS, the originating bank retains the loan’s control rights but no longer has an incentive to monitor; with loan sales, control rights pass to the buyer of the loan, who can then monitor, albeit in a less-informed manner. In a single-period setting, for high levels of base credit risk, only loan sales are used in equilibrium; risk transfer is ecient, but monitoring is excessive. For low levels of credit risk, equilibrium depends on the cost of capital shortfalls. When capital costs are low, only poor quality loans are sold or hedged; risk transfer is inecient,
Environmental Laws and Sustainability: An Introduction

In this introduction to the special issue of Sustainability on environmental laws and sustainability, we attempt to synthesize key lessons from the issue"s ten substantive articles. These lessons involve the use of law to achieve integrated decision-making, the use of pre-existing laws to foster sustainability, the centrality of sub-national governments in achieving sustainability, the background law of unsustainable development, the growing importance of climate change, the need to use law to protect and restore ecological integrity, the importance of judicial review and nongovernmental organizations, the need to translate sustainability into specific legal principles, the challenge of creating an appropriate national legal structure for sustainability, the importance of sustainability assessment tools and institutions before and after laws are adopted, and the importance of "soft" law.
A Good Opening: The Key to Make the Most of Unilateral Climate Action

In this paper we argue that when a subgroup of countries cooperate on emission reduction, the optimal response of non-signatory countries reflects the interaction between three potentially opposing factors, the incentive to free-ride on the environmental benefits of cooperation, the incentive to expand energy consumption, and the incentive to adopt the cleaner technologies introduced by the coalition. Using an Integrated Assessment Model with a game-theoretic structure we find that the equilibrium abatement of the coalition composed by OECD countries would be moderate, in line with the Pledges subscribed in Copenhagen, but increasing. The mitigation strategy would consist of investments in energy R&D and deployment of cleaner technologies with high learning potentials. International knowledge and technology externalities would facilitate the diffusion of cleaner technologies in non-signatory countries, offsetting the free-riding incentive and reducing their emissions. If the OECD group curbs emissions beyond the optimal equilibrium level, reaching reduction rates between 40 and 45 % below 2005 levels in 2050, the benefits of technology externalities would no longer compensate the effect of lower fossil fuel prices. Our results suggest that a moderate unilateral climate policy could induce a virtuous behaviour in non-signatory countries and that policies promoting the international transfer of technologies and knowledge could represent an effective complement to mitigation targets.
Reforming Trade Remedies

This article aims to restart the debate on trade remedies by offering new perspectives on the fundamental defects of the current trade remedy regime and by proposing a bold yet feasible roadmap for reforms. This article focuses on antidumping, the linchpin of trade remedies. While antidumping is being justified as a safety valve for protectionist pressures, I argue in this article that antidumping is a faulty safety valve in that it provides arbitrary levels of protection for petitioners, results in undue uncertainties for respondents, and has too low a threshold for activation. I further demonstrate that antidumping exacerbates democracy deficit in trade policy, as the mechanical formulas used for calculating antidumping duties deprive the trade remedy process of the democratic participation that is essential for seeking consensus and compromises on trade protectionism. I propose to replace antidumping with a new country-specific safeguard that has a heightened injury standard and a mandatory public interest clause. I argue that this country-specific safeguard comports with the policy objectives of trade remedies and is politically feasible. The global safeguard currently in use, by contrast, cannot provide the kind of trade protection demanded by users of antidumping. Finally, I argue that once the country-specific safeguard is adopted, countervailing duties should be subsumed under the country-specific safeguard as well.
REAL-TIME ECONOMETRICS

This paper considers the problems facing decision makers using econometric models in real time. It identifies the key stages involved and highlights the role of automated systems in reducing the effect of data snooping. It sets out many choices that researchers face in construction of automated systems and discusses some of the possible ways advanced in the literature for dealing with them. The role of feedbacks from the decision maker's actions to the data generating process is also discussed and highlighted through an example.
Takeover protection and managerial myopia: Evidence from real earnings management☆

Abstract We examine whether takeover protection exacerbates or mitigates real earnings management (i.e., using abnormal real activities to meet near-term earnings targets). Consistent with Stein’s (1988) prediction that takeover pressure induces managerial myopia, we find that less-protected firms are associated with higher levels of real earnings management. We further disentangle the value-destroying and signaling effects of real earnings management by finding that although abnormal real activities in general are associated with lower future performance, abnormal real activities intended to just meet earnings targets are associated with higher future performance, consistent with real earnings management conveying a signal of superior future performance in addition to a general value-destroying effect. Taken together, our evidence suggests that takeover protection reduces managers’ pressure to resort to real earnings management as a costly means of signaling better future performance.
Confrontation and the Re-Privatization of Domestic Violence

When the Supreme Court transformed the right of confrontation in Crawford v. Washington,1 the prosecution of domestic violence predictably suffered as a result. But commentators at the time did not anticipate how the Court’s subsequent Confrontation Clause cases would utterly misconceive the nature of domestic violence, producing a flawed understanding of what constitutes a “testimonial” statement. Although the Court’s definition was especially problematic in the domestic violence context, its overly rigid approach finally became intolerable in Michigan v. Bryant,2 a 2011 case that did not involve domestic violence. In Bryant, the Court resurrected a public– private divide that relegated domestic violence to quasicriminal status, at best. By distinguishing between “domestic”3 and “nondomestic”4 disputes and minimizing the harms and dangers associated with the former, the Court revived long-standing hierarchies that were ostensibly repudiated decades ago. In assessing the significance of the Crawford revolution after ten years, I focus here on this largely unremarked jurisprudential move, which raises the distinct possibility that a privatized notion of domestic violence infected the Court’s reasoning even before Bryant. Since the Supreme Court revamped the Confrontation Clause, we have witnessed a rather jurisprudentially unsettled decade. A sound articulation of the meaning of “testimonial,” which Crawford introduced but failed adequately to define,5 continues to elude the Court, and lower courts have struggled to implement the testimonial concept.
Robust Political Economy and the Lender of Last Resort

Of the leading versions of lender of last resort policy, which is to be preferred in a world of realistic incentive and information imperfections? The three most prominent versions of lender of last resort policy are: the Classical system of central bank lending on good collateral at a penalty rate, the Richmond Federal Reserve system of open market operations to prevent liquidity drains, and the New York Federal Reserve system of commitment to taking any and all action necessary to prevent the spread of financial contagion. We compare these policies to the mechanisms that developed in free banking systems. Free banking systems had no formal lender of last resort, but instead developed institutions that lessened the possibility of systemic panic in the first place. We find that free banking weakly dominates the Classical system. Free banking also outperforms the New York Fed and Richmond Fed systems on the incentive margin, but is weaker on the information margin. In addition, the paper discusses how the New York Fed doctrine is the only stable activist policy, since the limited responses necessitated by the Classical and Richmond Fed policies are not credible.
Capital Punishment in the United States, and Beyond

[This article explores the controversial topic of capital punishment, with a particular focus on its longstanding application in the United States. The use of the death penalty in the US has been the subject of much criticism both domestically and internationally. The numerous concerns addressed in this article relate to the morality of the punishment, its effectiveness, the uneven application of the penalty, and procedural problems. The US Supreme Court has confirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment while striking down particular uses of the death penalty. The US is not, however, alone in executing convicted defendants. Capital punishment is still being used by other jurisdictions, some with more prevalent use than the US, such as the People’s Republic of China and Singapore. However, as more nations abolish the death penalty, the question remains, why is capital punishment so widespread in the world?]
Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle

Many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can. But why does global information access not eliminate this asymmetry? We model investors, endowed with a small home information advantage, who choose what information to learn before they invest. Surprisingly, even when home investors can learn what foreigners know, they choose not to: Investors profit more from knowing information others do not know. Learning amplifies information asymmetry. The model matches patterns of local and industry bias, foreign investments, portfolio outperformance, and asset prices. Finally, we propose new avenues for empirical research.
Financial Planning Horizon: A Measure of Time Preference or a Situational Factor?

Many researchers have examined the influence of the financial planning horizon variable in the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Health and Retirement Study. The question asks respondents to choose the most important time period for saving and spending decisions. These researchers have assumed that the variable reflects the time preference of respondents. However, it is also possible that the variable reflects respondent situations. To examine whether the variable is situational or is a measure of a persistent preference, we used the 1992-2007 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances datasets and examined the relationship between household characteristics and the financial planning horizon. After controlling for demographic and economic variables, the estimated planning horizon shows a hump shape along with age that peaks at age 43. The results suggest that the financial planning horizon variable is a situational factor rather than measuring a constant time preference.
Through the Eyes of Jurors: The Use of Schemas in the Application of “Plain Language” Jury Instructions

“Through the Eyes of Jurors” is the first law journal article to consider all of the major cognitive psychology studies that examine how “schemas,” or the preexisting notions jurors have about the law, shape jurors’ use of jury instructions, even when those jurors are given “plain-language” instructions. This Article examines the social science research on schema theory in order to advance our understanding of how schemas continue to influence jurors’ use of jury instructions, even when those jurors are given “plain language” instructions.
Sentencing Enhancement and the Crime Victim's Brain

Criminal offenders who inflict serious bodily injury to another in the course of criminal conduct are typically sentenced more harshly than those who do not cause such injuries. But what if the harm caused is “mental” or “psychological” and not “physical”? Should the sentencing enhancement still apply? Federal and state courts are already wrestling with this issue, and modern neuroscience offers new challenges to courts’ analyses. This Article thus tackles the question: In light of current neuroscientific knowledge, when and how should sentencing enhancements for bodily injury include mental injuries? The Article argues that classification of “mental” as wholly distinct from “physical” is problematic in light of modern neuroscientific understanding of the relationship between mind and brain. There is no successful justification for treating mental injuries as categorically distinct from other physical injuries. There is, however, good reason for law to treat mental injuries as a unique type of physical injury. Enhancement of criminal penalties for mental injuries must pay special care to the causal connection between the offender’s act and the victim’s injury. Moreover, it is law, not science, that must be the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a sufficiently bad mental harm to justify a harsher criminal sentence, and of what evidence is sufficient to prove the mental injury.
Exit, Survival, and Competitive Equilibrium in Dealer Markets

In this study we analyze dealer exit, survival, and competitive equilibrium in the NASDAQ Stock Market using data from a unique time period that entails major changes in regulatory and competitive environments. We decompose the forces that affect dealer survival into market factors and dealer attributes. Market factors encompass those variables that affect the demand for and profitability of dealer services as a whole. Variation in survival probability across dealers results mainly from their competitive advantages in business strategies, information, quote aggressiveness, access to order flow, and economies of scale. On the whole, our results suggest that dealer markets exhibit a Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Modeling the “Pseudodeductible” in Insurance Claims Decisions

In many different managerial contexts, consumers “leave money on the table” by, for example, their failure to claim rebates, use available coupons, and so on. This project focuses on a related problem faced by homeowners who may be reluctant to file insurance claims despite the fact their losses are covered. We model this consumer decision by introducing the concept of the “pseudodeductible,” a latent threshold above the policy deductible that governs the homeowner's claim behavior. In addition, we show how the observed number of claims can be modeled as the output of three stochastic processes that are separately, and in conjunction, managerially relevant: the rate at which losses occur, the size of each loss, and the choice of the individual to file or not file a claim. By allowing for the possibility of pseudodeductibles, one can sort out (and make accurate inferences about) these three processes. We test this model using a proprietary data set provided by State Farm, the largest underwriter of personal lines insurance in the United States. Using mixtures of Dirichlet processes to capture heterogeneity and the interplay among the three processes, we uncover several relevant “stories” that underlie the frequency and severity of claims. For instance, some customers have a small number of losses, but all are filed as claims, whereas others may experience many more losses, but are more selective about which claims they file. These stories explain several observed phenomena regarding the claims decisions that insurance customers make, and have broad implications for customer lifetime value and market segmentation.
Asset Pricing in the Frequency Domain: Theory and Empirics

We quantify investors’ preferences over the dynamics of shocks by deriving frequency-specific risk prices that capture the price of risk of consumption fluctuations at each frequency. The frequency-specific risk prices are derived analytically for leading models. The decomposition helps measure the importance of economic fluctuations at different frequencies. We precisely quantify the meaning of “long-run” in the context of Epstein-Zin preferences – centuries – and measure the exact relevance of business-cycle fluctuations. Finally, we estimate frequency-specific risk prices and show that cycles longer than the business cycle – long-run risks – are significantly priced in the equity market.
Images of Health Insurance in Popular Film: The Dissolving Critique

Several recent films have villainized the health-insurance industry as a central element of their plots. This Article examines three of those films: Critical Care, The Rainmaker, and John Q. It analyzes these films through the context of the consumer backlash against managed care that began in the 1990s and shows how these films reflect the consumer sentiment regarding health-insurance companies and the cost controlling strategies they employ. In addition, the Article identifies three key premises about health insurance in the films that, although exaggerated and incomplete, have significant factual support. Ultimately, the author argues that, despite their passionately critical and liberal tone, these films actually put forward solutions that are highly individualist and conservative, rather than inclusive and systemic.
Market reactions to policy deliberations on fair value accounting and impairment rules during the financial crisis of 2008–2009

Abstract Fair value accounting (FVA) has been blamed for amplifying the financial crisis of 2008–2009. We investigate investor and creditor reactions to policymaker deliberations, recommendations and decisions about FVA and impairment rules in the banking industry. If FVA was a key contributor to the financial crisis as some industry pundits and academic research suggest, we first should observe positive stock market reactions to proposals that relax FVA rules and negative reactions when policymakers support FVA. Second, we investigate cross-sectional stock price reactions to bank-specific factors that potentially contributed to pro-cyclical contagion. Third, we examine whether banks that have fewer alternative sources of information about fair values experience relatively negative reactions to potential relaxation of FVA and impairment rules. Finally, we investigate credit market reactions to these policy deliberations, recommendations and decisions by examining changes in credit default swap spreads for a subset of banks in our sample. Our first result suggests that investors acted as if the potential negative effects of then-existing FVA and impairment rules outweighed any benefits associated with having more timely and transparent mark-to-market data for decision-making. Second, while our cross-sectional test results are mixed, our most robust result suggests that the magnitude of stock price reactions to the relaxation of FVA and impairment rules was positively related to the proportion of banks’ illiquid assets. Third, we provide mixed evidence that banks without analyst coverage (and thus presumably fewer alternative sources about fair values) were harmed by proposals and policies that relaxed FVA and impairment rules. Finally, our results on credit market reactions suggest that positive stock market reactions to the potential relaxation of FVA rules are not likely caused by wealth transfers from creditors to shareholders.
Voter attitudes when democracy promotion turns partisan: evidence from a survey-experiment in Lebanon

This article studies how voters react when foreign powers support a particular political party in a fragile democracy. The article identifies which voters believe the intervention plays a positive role in the electoral process and which voters have the opposite opinion. The article argues that educated and politically sophisticated voters will reject such interventions because of the negative role those play in the democratization process. Specific hypotheses are developed based on this argument and were tested in a randomized framing experiment embedded in a post-election survey of 2500 voters in Lebanon 2009. The survey results confirm the argument above. Furthermore, this study derives implications for the risks and benefits of ‘guiding’ democratic outcomes from abroad.
The Commerce Clause Meets Environmental Protection: The Compensatory Tax doctrine as a Defense of Potential Regional Carbon Dioxide Regulation

On December 20, 2005, seven northeastern states signed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative ("RGGI"), an agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas pollution from power plants. Once enacted by each state's legislature or rulemaking agencies, this agreement will establish a "cap-and-trade" program to cap greenhouse gas emissions within the region and allow power plants to trade emissions allocations. This program faces a significant challenge, however. Electricity suppliers within the region may import power from outside the regulated region to avoid the constraints of the emissions cap, resulting in little or no net decrease in overall emissions—a problem known as "leakage." Because limiting emissions imports would inevitably place burdens on the interstate trade of electricity, the regulatory approaches available to RGGI states to limit imports of power from unregulated regions may be subject to attack as violations of the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This Note explores the possibility of applying the concepts embodied in the compensatory tax doctrine to defend a regulatory scheme that the RGGI states might employ to combat leakage.
International Trends in Environmental Impact Assessment

This paper explores the range of legislation that has created the EIA mandate. A more comprehensive study of all EIA laws is under preparation by the Commission on Environmental Law of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, but this study will not be complete until 1992. In the absence of such an exhaustive analysis, this paper sketches the global legislative trends in EIA.
Human trafficking: a global multi-billion dollar criminal industry

Human trafficking is the exploitation of people as property for forced labour, sexual exploitation, and organ trade. Human trafficking is a major crime industry, generating about $32 billion in revenues annually. This study examines the global scope of human trafficking and its negative effect on world society. This study tests the relationship between human trafficking and a country’s level of corruption. Results indicate that higher levels of corruption are associated with higher levels of human trafficking. Corruption though is only one factor in human trafficking; ultimately, ending human trafficking requires changing peoples’ attitudes and actions. Human trafficking exists because there is a demand for the products and services connected to it.
Implementing an evolving human right through water and sanitation policy

With water and sanitation vital to the public’s health, there have been growing calls to accept water and sanitation as a human right and establish a rights-based framework for water policy. Through the development of international law, policymakers have increasingly specified water and sanitation as independent human rights. In this political development of human rights for water and sanitation, the authors find that the evolution of rights-based water and sanitation policy reached a milestone in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly’s 2010 Resolution on the Human Right to Water and Sanitation. By memorializing international political recognition of these interconnected rights and the corresponding obligations of national governments, states provided a normative framework for expanded efforts to realize human rights through water and sanitation policy. Examining the opportunities created by this UN Resolution, this article analyzes the implementation of the human right to water and sanitation through global water governance, national water policy and water and sanitation outcomes. While obstacles remain in the implementation of this right, the authors conclude that the UN Resolution could have lasting benefits for public health.
Asset returns in an endogenous growth model with incomplete markets

Abstract This paper analyzes a class of stochastic endogenous growth models with uninsurable idiosyncratic income risk. The model economy is populated by infinitely-lived households who own and operate their own business, work for a stock company, and participate in stock and bond markets. Households have log-utility preferences and production functions exhibit constant returns to scale with respect to produced input factors (physical and human capital). If the idiosyncratic component of productivity and depreciation shocks is unpredictable, then there exists an equilibrium that can be found by solving a one-agent decision problem. The paper also analyzes the asset return implications of a calibrated model economy with an individual income process that displays realistic variations in idiosyncratic income risk. The calibrated model economy generates an equity premium of 1% if the volatility of implied stock returns matches the volatility of observed U.S. stock returns.
What’s in a name? Measuring prominence and its impact on organic traffic from search engines

Organic product search results on Google and Bing do not systematically include information about seller characteristics (e.g., feedback ratings and prices). Consequently, it is often assumed that a retailer’s organic traffic is driven by the prominence of its position in the list of search results. We propose a novel measure of the prominence of a retailer’s name, and show that it is also an important predictor of the organic traffic retailers enjoy from product searches through Google and Bing. We also show that failure to account for the prominence of retailers’ names—as well as the endogeneity of retailers’ positions in the list of search results—significantly inflates the estimated impact of screen position on organic clicks.
The Power Behind the Promise: Enforcing No Child Left Behind to Improve Education

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's recognition in 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that education is of paramount importance, six million middle and high school students are still in danger of being left behind. Less than seventy-five percent of eighth graders, fifty percent in urban schools, are graduating from high school within five years. Advocates for educational equity have appealed to the courts, achieving limited success. They have also turned to the legislature, which most recently enacted the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ("NCLB"). Thus far, however, the federal government has not enforced NCLB adequately. This Note argues that to protect the benefits NCLB confers upon them, parents of children attending failing schools must explore their options for private enforcement. Given the Court's decisions within the past three years narrowing implied private right of action and § 1983, the most promising theory for enforcement of NCLB is third-party beneficiary theory,
Monotonicity of the stochastic discount factor and expected option returns

Evidence shows that the stochastic discount factor (SDF) is not always a downward-sloping function of S&P 500 returns when estimated using options data. In contrast, our results suggest that SDFs as functions of individual stock returns are generally downward sloping. A simple jump-diffusion model can reconcile these empirical findings. The same model also implies a steeper implied-volatility curve for the index than for the typical stock, a well-known empirical fact from the options literature. Both the SDF and volatility-curve results can be explained by a common source of jump risk among stocks, together with diversification of Brownian risk in the index. We also devise novel empirical tests of SDF monotonicity based on average returns of option trading strategies, thus avoiding the estimation of the return density functions.
Soft Law’s Failure on the Horizon: The International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities

On January 11, 2007, the People’s Republic of China conducted a successful test of an anti-satellite weapon against one of its own aging weather satellites that produced a massive cloud of long-lasting orbital debris in space. The test highlighted both the growing possibility that orbital debris may ultimately render space unusable for all activities there and the reality of an increasingly militarized, contested and insecure geopolitical space environment. Largely in response to this incident, and in an effort to enhance the safety, security and sustainability of space activities, the European Union developed a draft “International Code of Conduct for Activities in Outer Space” (the ICoC or the Code) in 2008. The proposed Code, which continues to be debated by the international community, is an example of a legally non-binding "soft law" instrument which also contains broad, imprecise statements of principles. While soft law has made important contributions to the legal and administrative framework that governs space, the Code does not hold such promise. Instead, this article argues that the Code is a case study in the limitations of soft law, particularly when employed as a mechanism to regulate military activities and weapons in a highly insecure environment. Moreover, it is notably ill-suited in this context and in its design to successfully address the critical problem of orbital space debris. As a soft law instrument with both soft law’s general limitations and its own particular shortcomings, the Code is an ineffective measure that distracts attention from more meaningful initiatives to reduce orbital debris while at the same time risking increasing tensions in space, diminishing the existing legal framework governing space activities, and negatively affecting the future development of space law.
Do Management Changes Matter? An Empirical Investigation of REIT Performance

Management’s (board of directors or executive officers) contribution to a firm is difficult to directly observe, although stock return performance can be a source of information. This study addresses this issue by extending the work of McIntosh, Rogers, Sirmans and Liang (1994) by analyzing management changes within REITs from 1984 to 2002. The findings indicate a significant relationship between negative performance and a management change from a period three months prior to the change in management. Logit and probit analysis are used to determine whether negative firm performance (measured by its relationship to market returns) can predict the likelihood of a management change. No predictive ability is found.This paper received the award for the best paper on Real Estate Investment Trusts [sponsored by the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (NAREIT)] presented at the 2004 ARES Annual Meeting.
Foreword: Criminal Justice Responses to the Economic Crisis

The epidemic rate of incarceration in the United States, long documented, has come at significant financial and social cost. But the global financial crisis has forced legislators and government officials to face issues that they had previously been able to ignore: whether incarceration is the best use of resources to deal with non-violent offenders, whether former inmates should be sent back to prison for violations of conditions of their post-conviction release, rather than for new criminal activity, whether sentences should be so long that the prison population becomes increasingly geriatric. At the same time, taxpayers are beginning to realize that they are not always getting a decent return on their corrections dollar. Crime, and the fear of it, is no longer dominating the domestic agenda. And fiscal conservatives are edging out “tough on crime” rhetoric with proposals to be “smart on crime.” The goal of the Symposium, held in Atlanta on January 27, 2012, was to bring together a number of scholars and practitioners to see how the moment might be leveraged to produce sustainable change. Cognizant of the ephemeral quality of reform that is solely cost-driven, the participants proposed a variety of solutions that could have staying power, even after the good times return. While controversial, large-scale reforms may remain out of reach, perhaps an accumulation of incremental changes might add up to an overall shift in focus, away from the punitive overreliance on incarceration, and towards a more just, evidence-based and cost-effective justice system.
Schuette , Electoral Process Guarantees, and the New Neutrality

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the United States Supreme Court addressed the breadth of electoral process guarantees, which have stood as a bulwark against attempts to impose extra electoral burdens on discrete minorities. While the Schuette holding is clear — federal constitutional guarantees are not necessarily violated by the voters’ amending their state constitution to preclude the state from affording racial preferences — the plurality opinion raises more questions than it answers both with respect to the particular constitutional doctrine before the Court and with respect to equal protection jurisprudence more generally. The plurality has now not only left open what electoral process guarantees mean and whether they have any force, but has also muddled equal protection jurisprudence. The article concludes that the Schuette plurality not only undermined the electoral process jurisprudence that it was claiming to follow, but misapplied settled equal protection principles, which will create chaos in the lower courts unless corrected or clarified.