cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence

AbstractWe replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts (M. M. Pitt & S. R. Khandker’s, ‘The impact of group-based credit on poor households in Bangladesh: Does the gender of participants matter?’, published in the Journal of Political Economy, 106, 1998). That study was celebrated for showing that microcredit reduces poverty, a much hoped for possibility (though one not confirmed by recent randomised controlled trials). We show that the original results on poverty reduction disappear after dropping outliers, or when using a robust linear estimator. Using a new program for estimation of mixed process maximum likelihood models, we show how assumptions critical for the original analysis, such as error normality, are contradicted by the data. We conclude that questions about impact cannot be answered in these data.
Balancing Transparency: The Value of Administrative Law and Mathews-Balancing to Investment Treaty Arbitrations

Greater reliance on arbitration to resolve cross-border disputes raises concern with the adequacy of arbitration procedural rules. In investment arbitration, transparency in the arbitrable proceedings is closely linked to the public need to review state conduct. This article draws on the responsibility of the arbitrator to balance the interests involved in an arbitration. Due consideration is given to the Global Administrative Law Project, which views many challenges affecting arbitration as the first step towards developing a global unifying standard of procedure. American domestic administrative law provides sufficient guidance in determining adequate procedure. The Mathews standard is of great value to arbitrators, especially when prior court decisions have implicitly adopted a balancing standard when reviewing the arbitrator’s discretion.
Questioning the Trust Law Duty of Loyalty: Sole Interest or Best Interest?

I. ADDRESSING CONFLICTS OF INTEREST 934 A. The Ubiquity of Conflicts 934 1. Family and Personal Life 935 2. Nontrust Service Providers 936 3. Settlor-Authorized Conflicts in Trusts 938 4. Trustee Compensation 939 5. Estate Administration 941
A model of entrepreneurial activity with two actions over time and under uncertainty

We analyze the activities of an entrepreneur who must, at each date, decide whether to search for a new production technique or to produce output with an extant technique. Our analysis leads to four results. First, we show that if our entrepreneur rejects a particular production technique at a specific point in time then he will never accept this same technique at a subsequent point in time. Second, we demonstrate that if our entrepreneur accepts a particular production technique at a specific point in time then he will continue to produce with this technique at all succeeding points in time. Third, we show that there is a threshold production technology level and that our entrepreneur’s optimal policy involves accepting (rejecting) all techniques above (below) this threshold. Finally, we study the effects of increases in an exogenous income source and the discount factor on our entrepreneur’s threshold technology level.
A “Subterranean Agenda”? Racial Attitudes, Presidential Evaluations, and Tea Party Membership

Recent research suggests that fiscally conservative policy preferences and disapproval of President Obama are significant predictors of Tea Party membership (Maxwell and Parent 2012). Unfortunately, however, we know very little about the reasons why Tea Party members so aggressively disapprove of President Obama. While Tea Party members adamantly deny that President Obama’s race plays any role in their motivations, their critics argue that racial attitudes are a primary reason why individuals choose to join the movement. In this article, using national survey data conducted by Knowledge Networks (n = 1649), we explore the possibility that three unique racial attitudes have been influential in the establishment of the Tea Party. Specifically, we investigate the role of symbolic racism, racial stereotypes, and ethnocentrism as predictors of self-identified Tea Party membership among whites.
Sorting Out “Fair Use” and “Likelihood of Confusion” in Trademark Law

This article explores the boundaries of commercial trademark law and others' fair use of those marks. Coverage of recent cases in this practice area demonstrates how courts try to strike a balance between competition and consumer confusion in original and follow-on uses. Prior to the Supreme Court's decision in KP Permanent Make-Up v. Lasting Impression, there had been a split among the circuit courts on this issue. The author notes that to the extent the Supreme Court allows fair uses, even those that create a nominative amount of consumer confusion, this creates an incentive for mark owners to create stronger branding strategies.
Impacts of the US Trade and Financial Sanctions on Iran

This article presents a case study of the effectiveness of the US unilateral trade and financial sanctions on Iran. To assess the trade sanctions’ effect, the US–Iran historical trade data are examined, and the economic cost of trade sanctions is measured by applying the concept of welfare loss. The financial sanctions’ impacts are evaluated by assessing the extra charges Iran has paid on its foreign debt obligations and for financing its oil development projects. At the end, the efficacy of the US sanctions policy towards Iran is evaluated. It is found that the financial sanctions have had a more powerful impact than the trade sanctions. The analysis also shows that the unilateral import sanctions on the fungible crude oil have been ineffective. It is concluded that, overall, the sanctions’ economic effect has been significant, while its political effect has been minimal. This article suggests that targeting the sanctions towards the ruling clergy can improve their effectiveness while lessening their side effects on the Iranian population. Precise smart sanctions to force the ruling clerics to step down will calm down Islamic fundamentalisms throughout the region and will contribute to peace and better relations with the West.
Democracy and Feminism

Although feminist legal theory has had an important impact on most areas of legal doctrine and theory over the last two decades, its contribution to the debate over constitutional interpretation has been comparatively small. In this Article, Professor Higgins explores reasons for the limited dialogue between mainstream constitutional theory and feminist theory concerning questions of democracy, constitutionalism, and judicial review. She argues that mainstream constitutional theory tends to take for granted the capacity of the individual to make choices, leaving the social construction of those choices largely unexamined. In contrast, feminist legal theory's emphasis on the importance of constraints on women's choices has led to a neglect of questions of citizenship and sovereignty within a democratic system. By comparing mainstream constitutional theory and feminist theory, Professor Higgins highlights the existing limitations of both. She argues both that mainstream constitutional theory must take into account feminist arguments concerning constraints on individual choice and that feminist theory must take seriously the mainstream debate over democratic legitimacy. Integrating these distinct concerns, she suggests a framework for constitutional interpretation that reflects a feminist conception of citizenship under conditions of inequality.
The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in heterogeneous populations

Abstract How do human groups maintain a high level of cooperation despite a low level of genetic relatedness among group members? We suggest that many humans have a predisposition to punish those who violate group-beneficial norms, even when this imposes a fitness cost on the punisher. Such altruistic punishment is widely observed to sustain high levels of cooperation in behavioral experiments and in natural settings. We offer a model of cooperation and punishment that we call strong reciprocity : where members of a group benefit from mutual adherence to a social norm, strong reciprocators obey the norm and punish its violators, even though as a result they receive lower payoffs than other group members, such as selfish agents who violate the norm and do not punish, and pure cooperators who adhere to the norm but free-ride by never punishing. Our agent-based simulations show that, under assumptions approximating likely human environments over the 100,000 years prior to the domestication of animals and plants, the proliferation of strong reciprocators when initially rare is highly likely, and that substantial frequencies of all three behavioral types can be sustained in a population. As a result, high levels of cooperation are sustained. Our results do not require that group members be related or that group extinctions occur.
The burden of proof in civil litigation: A simple model of mechanism design

Abstract The existing literature on the burden of proof has sought the rule's reason for existence solely within the court's problem of decision making under uncertainty. Although this search has yielded many insights, it has been less successful in providing a compelling explanation for why uncertainty in the court's final assessment should act to the detriment of one party rather than the other. By viewing the problem as one of mechanism design, this paper provides one explanation for the asymmetry. A rule resembling the burden of proof emerges from the optimal design of a system of fact-finding tribunals in the presence of: (i) limited resources for the resolution of private disputes; and (ii) asymmetric information—as between the parties and the court—about the strength of cases, before the court expends the resources necessary for a hearing. The paper shows that if the objective in designing a trial court system is the accuracy of recovery granted, the “value” of having heard a case will depend in part on the certainty with which the court makes its final award. An optimally designed court system will then effectively filter out “less valuable” cases by precommitting to a recovery policy in which plaintiffs recover nothing unless they prove their cases with a threshold degree of certainty.
Pass-through of exchange rates and tariffs in Greek-US tobacco trade

Abstract The paper examines the extent to which exchange rate and unit tariff changes are passed-through in US import prices of unmanufactured Greek oriental tobacco. The results indicate partial pass-through of exchange rates and tariffs. Exchange rate pass-through is about 0.272 and tariff pass-through about 0.185. One possible reason for the partial pass-through is oligopoly in tobacco exporting. Oligopoly would imply that depreciation of the drachma relative to the US dollar benefits tobacco exporters operating in Greece. A second possible reason is a possible correlation between exchange rates premiums paid to tobacco exporters in previous agricultural policies. An important implication of this possible correlation is that Greek tobacco prices may be more sensitive to exchange rate changes under the current agricultural policy.
When does insider selling support a “strong inference” of fraud?

Abstract Plaintiffs in securities fraud class action lawsuits often allege that sales by insiders support a “strong inference” of fraudulent intent. This study examines insider transaction activity for a sample of 842 companies sued in lawsuits alleging a violation of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to ascertain whether net insider selling during the litigation class period is unusual in amount and timing relative to net insider selling at other times and at other firms. We find that class period net insider selling for the litigation sample significantly exceeds net insider selling before and after the class period and exceeds net insider selling around the same dates for a sample matched on industry. The more pronounced differences are for firms with a greater asymmetry of information between insiders and outsiders, namely, smaller firms and firms with lower analyst coverage. We also document a significant, positive association between net insider sales and short interest, particula...
Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate

Which individual has the greater lasting impact upon the path of American law: The median Supreme Court justice or an entrepreneurial law professor at an institution with a high degree of centrality? Given that we are inclined to support the former, we offer this provocative question not to provide a definitive conclusion but rather to encourage greater incorporation of the American legal academy in positive legal theory. A growing body of work demonstrates that the perspectives held by these legal elites, in their position as both repositories and distributors of legal information, has consequences for American common law development. Specifically, while we believe additional empirical and theoretical work is needed, a deep relationship between the American legal academy and the development of American law has been highlighted in a variety of recent historical institutionalist scholarship. For example, leading scholars such as Brandwein and Graber offer compelling qualitative evidence linking members
Global Stocks and Contemporaneous Market Risk

This paper provides a comprehensive set of contemporaneous estimates of the market risk for globally listed stocks on 59 world equity markets. The results reveal that the estimates of the systematic risk of a stock are distinct from market to market, and from the stock’s corresponding estimate of its global beta. The limitations of these estimates and, in particular, the constraints under which they are computed are pointed out. The results also indicate the need to first refine upon the single-market country estimate of the beta in the original capital asset pricing model (CAPM) before extending and or analyzing such estimates in determining the corresponding global beta.
If You’re Against Them You’re With Us: The Effect of Expropriation on Autocratic Survival

This article advances a theory of why some dictators weaken the elite through expropriation whereas others do not. When the organization that launches a new dictator into power is uncertain about whether he will remain loyal to them, a dictator’s decision to expropriate the preexisting elite may contribute to political stability by signaling his exclusive reliance on this group. The authors corroborate this claim empirically. Using new data compiled on land, resource, and bank expropriations in Latin America from 1950 to 2002, the authors show that large-scale expropriation helps dictators survive in power. Furthermore, expropriation tends to occur early in a dictator’s tenure, and its effect on leader survival decays over time, providing additional evidence for its signaling value. The history of autocracy in Mexico between 1911 and 2000 further illustrates the importance of expropriation in promoting autocratic survival as well as how the codification of new property rights can transform a dictator’s la...
The Power of Rankings: Quantifying the Effect of Rankings on Online Consumer Search and Purchase Decisions

Online search intermediaries, such as Amazon or Expedia, use rankings (ordered lists) to present third-party sellers’ products to consumers. These rankings decrease consumer search costs and increa...
Cyclic spectral analysis of radio pulsars

Cyclic spectral analysis is a signal-processing technique designed to deal with stochastic signals whose statistics vary periodically with time. Pulsar radio emission is a textbook example of this signal class, known as cyclostationary signals. In this paper, we discuss the application of cyclic spectral analysis methods to pulsar data and compare the results with the traditional filterbank approaches used for almost all pulsar observations to date. In contrast to standard methods, the cyclic spectrum preserves phase information of the radio signal. This feature allows us to determine the impulse response of the interstellar medium and the intrinsic, unscattered pulse profile directly from a single observation. We illustrate these new analysis techniques using real data from an observation of the millisecond pulsar B1937+21.
Dyadic Analysis in International Relations: A Cautionary Tale

We explore problems with the use of dyadic data in international relations. We illustrate these problems by analyzing a central proposition among IR scholars that democracies seek out other democracies as trading partners. Our main contribution is to present randomization tests to infer the correct p-values associated with the trade hypotheses. Our results show that typical statistical tests for significance are severely overconfident in dyadic data. Second, we show that democratic trade can be modeled using nations as the units of analysis, testing whether the proportion of trade with other democracies increases when a country becomes more democratic. Third, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis of change in trading partners following democratic or anti-democratic shocks. Rather than adding further layers of statistical complexity, these tests are simple and intuitive. They provide the cleanest evidence that when nations undergo democratic or nondemocratic transitions, their trade patterns change just as theory would suggest.
Understanding Shifting Power Relations within and across Organizations: A Critical Genre Analysis

Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of a consulting project, we examine how conditions of novelty and ambiguity on interorganizational engagements produce inconsistent norms and expectations for guiding project interaction. Clients and consultants attempt to resolve the resulting discursive tensions while also increasing their organization's influence on the project. As diverse institutional contexts offer multiple legitimate ways of practicing, agents draw on such alternatives to renegotiate power relations. We develop a theoretical framework and empirical approach for understanding how discursive resources from diverse institutional contexts can be used to transform power relations within and between organizations.
AI human impact: toward a model for ethical investing in AI-intensive companies

Does AI conform to humans, or will we conform to AI? An ethical evaluation of AI-intensive companies will allow investors to knowledgeably participate in the decision. The evaluation is built from ...
Uncertain Land Titles in Louisiana's Formative Years: Colonial Grants, John Marshall's Foster Opinion, and Lauterpachtian Interplays between Private Law and International Law

In his seminal dissertation for the doctorate, approved by the Faculty of Laws of the University of London in 1925 and published in 1927, Hersch Lauterpacht draws our attention to a trend in the science of international law of disparaging private law sources and analogies despite their saliency for international law doctrine and practice. However, his call to stem this development has not been heeded. While insisting domestic lawyers should know how international lawyers think and how international law works, international law scholars have continued to wall off “their” discipline of international law under the mantle of scientific autonomy. This campaign, which has been fueled by and advertised with the allure of self-sufficiency and modernity, has proliferated carefully branded and jealously guarded reservations of theory and expertise. Such club mentality, it is submitted, poses the great risk of puzzling and alienating the many who are not privy to membership. Even more significantly, it purports to expunge an entire methodology from the tableau of international law theory and practice in this country, despite having stood the test of time. Through a case study of the uncertainties surrounding land titles in Louisiana’s formative years and Chief Justice Marshall’s iconic Foster opinion of 1829, this article endeavors to revalidate Sir Hersch’s proposition of deploying private law methods and institutions to explain and shape international law questions. The article refers to these interactions as “Lauterpachtian nexi.”
Manipulability of Stable Mechanisms

We study the manipulability of stable matching mechanisms and show that manipulability comparisons are equivalent to preference comparisons: for any agent, a mechanism is more manipulable than another if and only if this agent prefers the latter to the former. One important implication is that when agents on one side of the market have unit demand, no stable matching mechanism is less manipulable than another for all agents.
Licensure of Health Care Professionals: The Consumer's Case for Abolition

While state medical licensure laws ostensibly are intended to promote worthwhile goals, such as the maintenance of high standards in health care delivery, this Article argues that these laws in practice are detrimental to consumers. The Article takes the position that licensure contributes to high medical care costs and stifles competition, innovation and consumer autonomy. It concludes that delicensure would expand the range of health services available to consumers and reduce patient dependency, and that these developments would tend to make medical practice more satisfying to consumers and providers of health care services.
Pinterest and Copyright's Safe Harbors for Internet Providers

Has the time come to substantially revise the Copyright Act to better adapt the law to the ever-evolving digital environment? A number of influential sources appear to think so. If their initiatives gain momentum, it will be important to consider lessons learned from the first such effort fifteen years ago when Congress made far-reaching changes to copyright law by extending the term of copyright for twenty years and by enacting a package of reform proposals known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). This Article intertwines the story of one important provision of the DMCA - safe harbors for Internet service providers (“ISPs”) - with a case study of Pinterest as a successful beneficiary of the DMCA’s safe harbor policy. While some improvements are needed to protect users of protected services against indiscriminate automated takedown notices and to encourage greater licensing of on-demand content, this case study illustrates why any reform entailing substantial reallocation of enforcement responsibilities from copyright owners to service providers would be problematic and would undermine the support for innovation embedded in this policy.
Virtue out of Necessity? Compliance, Commitment, and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains:

Private, voluntary compliance programs, promoted by global corporations and nongovernmental organizations alike, have produced only modest and uneven improvements in working conditions and labor ri...
Equilibrium bias of technology

This paper presents three sets of results about equilibrium bias of technology. First, I show that when the menu of technological possibilities only allows for factor-augmenting technologies, the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change relatively biased toward that factor-meaning that the induced technological change increases the relative marginal product of the factor becoming more abundant. Moreover, this induced bias can be strong enough to make the relative marginal product of a factor increasing in response to an increase in its supply, thus leading to an upward-sloping relative demand curve. I also show that these results about relative bias do not generalize when more general menus of technological possibilities are considered. Second, I prove that under mild assumptions, the increase in the supply of a factor induces technological change that is absolutely biased toward that factor-meaning that it increases its marginal product at given factor proportions. The third and most important result in the paper establishes the possibility of and conditions for strong absolute equilibrium bias-whereby the price (marginal product) of a factor increases in response to an increase in its supply. I prove that, under some regularity conditions, there will be strong absolute equilibrium bias if and only if the aggregate production function of the economy fails to be jointly concave in factors and technology. This type of failure of joint concavity is possible in economies where equilibrium factor demands and technologies result from the decisions of different agents. Copyright The Econometric Society 2007.
Social entrepreneurs as the paragons of shared value creation? A critical perspective

– The financial crisis of 2007/2008 has caused many to question the basic premises of the current business system. Porter and Kramer suggest that the purpose of the corporation needs to be redefined. They posit that the corporation, rather than merely pursuing financial value creation set out to pursue shared value creation. They further declare social entrepreneurs the paragons of said shared‐value creation. The purpose of this paper is to explore that claim., – This paper critically analyzes the pathway of shared‐value creation in three leading social enterprises employing a genealogical perspective., – It is found that very innovative shared‐value creating ventures opted out of balance‐oriented, shared‐value creation strategies and embraced either financial or social‐value primacy strategies over time. The findings thus question the power of the shared‐value creation notion when viewed as balance orientation., – The paper presents a new concept, a new methodology, and interesting case studies.
Design vs. Emergence in a Theory of Federalism: Toward Institutional Reconciliation

It is common to think of federalism as a governmental arrangement that entails competition among governments. Thinking this way, however, is problematic. A competitive system is generally associated with the notion of polycentricity, as illustrated by a market system of free and open competition. The structure of such a system emerges through a competitive process and changes continually as that process operates. By contrast, a federalist system of governments is typically designed as against being emergent, and with that design involving some assignment of powers, duties, and competencies among the member governments. A genuinely competitive federalism must thus be designed in such a fashion as to mirror the workings of a spontaneously generated order. While it is comparatively easy to think of competition among a horizontal array of governments, it is more difficult to do that when those governments are nested within a vertical array of governments. Furthermore, the problem of the anti-commons comes into play in dealing with federal systems because the inalienability of property rights within governmental entities works to stifle the continual adaptation in governmental structure that a genuine system of competitive federalism requires.
Does the Stock Market Fully Appreciate the Implications of Leading Indicators for Future Earnings? Evidence from Order Backlog

Although leading indicators are becoming increasingly important for equity valuation, disclosures of such indicators suffer from the absence of GAAP related guidance on content and presentation. We explicitly examine (i) whether one leading indicator—order backlog—predicts future earnings, and (ii) whether market participants correctly incorporate such predictive ability in determining share prices. We find that the stock market overweights the contribution of order backlog in predicting future earnings, and a hedge strategy that exploits such overweighting generates significant future abnormal returns. However, such mispricing is not due to analysts' inability to incorporate order backlog into their earnings forecasts.
TREATMENT OF MOBILE PHONE LICENSES IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS

This paper addresses the question of how to record mobile phone license payments in the national accounts. It concludes that there are usually two assets involved with mobile phone licenses: the spectrum, which is owned by the government, and the license, which is an intangible nonproduced asset sold by the government to the licenseholder. The values of these two assets are linked complementarily. A set of indicators is proposed that jointly may help judging whether the license or lease arrangement constitutes an asset in its own right or not. Alternative treatments of recording the license payments such as sale of the spectrum itself, other taxes on production, production of a service, or rent, are considered and rejected. Methods of amortization of the license over its life are considered.
Public-Private Partnerships and Insurance Regulation

A public-private partnership (PPP) is an institutional arrangement that embodies a collaborative approach to policy and regulation; it is a joint venture between the government and one or more private sector entities. Joint financing partnerships link public financing and private insurance to pay for certain social goods. Where the financing for social goods is fragmented and overlapping, as it is for health and social care, joint financing PPPs may help organize existing financing streams. This piece argues that partnerships of this type also present an opportunity for consumer-protective regulation of the insurance industry if certain conditions are met. Private insurers must perceive benefits to the partnership, government actors must be motivated to protect the government’s financial stake, and government interests must align with those of consumers. It uses the Medicaid Partnership for Long-Term Care to illustrate the argument.
Boosting Item-based Collaborative Filtering via Nearly Uncoupled Random Walks

Item-based models are among the most popular collaborative filtering approaches for building recommender systems. Random walks can provide a powerful tool for harvesting the rich network of interactions captured within these models. They can exploit indirect relations between the items, mitigate the effects of sparsity, ensure wider itemspace coverage, as well as increase the diversity of recommendation lists. Their potential however, can be hindered by the tendency of the walks to rapidly concentrate towards the central nodes of the graph, thereby significantly restricting the range of K-step distributions that can be exploited for personalized recommendations. In this work, we introduce RecWalk; a novel random walk-based method that leverages the spectral properties of nearly uncoupled Markov chains to provably lift this limitation and prolong the influence of users’ past preferences on the successive steps of the walk—thereby allowing the walker to explore the underlying network more fruitfully. A comprehensive set of experiments on real-world datasets verify the theoretically predicted properties of the proposed approach and indicate that they are directly linked to significant improvements in top-n recommendation accuracy. They also highlight RecWalk’s potential in providing a framework for boosting the performance of item-based models. RecWalk achieves state-of-the-art top-n recommendation quality outperforming several competing approaches, including recently proposed methods that rely on deep neural networks.
TERRITORIALITY AS A REGULATORY TECHNIQUE: NOTES FROM THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

For all of the attention brought to bear on global financial regulation, relatively little scholarly energy has been directed towards thinking through the mechanics of how national regulators govern international pools of capital via their domestic rulemaking authority. This Article responds to this weak link in the literature by providing a short conceptual overview of the operationalization of supervisory power by national regulatory authorities. It argues that “territorial” authority in financial regulation - commonly considered both a source and limitation of control over local firms - in practice constitutes a diverse array of tactics employed by national authorities to exert authority over mobile market participants. As such, it can facilitate the projection of regulatory beyond national borders, especially for countries enjoying large capital and customer markets. This Article then contextualizes territoriality against the backdrop of financial globalization and shows how the “rise of the rest” changes the international regulatory order as other countries have developed their own liquid financial centers and means of (extra)territorial influence. Specifically, this Article argues that as emerging markets have become more important, the costs of unilateral territorialism and non-cooperation by traditionally dominant countries have increased, which has helped spur new efforts at international coordination, as well as innovative initiatives aimed at leveraging hard and soft power to promote national policy preferences abroad. Nevertheless, this Article concludes that territoriality remains a central element in international coordination and the bargaining process..
Competition, Managerial Slack, and Corporate Governance

We model the interaction between product market competition and internal governance at firms. Competition makes it more difficult to infer a manager’s action given the realized output, thus increasing the cost of inducing effort. An exogenous change in the incentive to shirk increases managerial slack. However, the effects on firm value are ambiguous; in particular, firm value can increase as slack increases. As a result, empirical tests that focus on changes in value may not capture changes in the level of slack. We also provide conditions under which increased competition leads all firms to switch from high to low effort.
Merging K‐means with hierarchical clustering for identifying general‐shaped groups

Clustering partitions a dataset such that observations placed together in a group are similar but different from those in other groups. Hierarchical and K-means clustering are two approaches but have different strengths and weaknesses. For instance, hierarchical clustering identifies groups in a tree-like structure but suffers from computational complexity in large datasets while K-means clustering is efficient but designed to identify homogeneous spherically-shaped clusters. We present a hybrid non-parametric clustering approach that amalgamates the two methods to identify general-shaped clusters and that can be applied to larger datasets. Specifically, we first partition the dataset into spherical groups using K-means. We next merge these groups using hierarchical methods with a data-driven distance measure as a stopping criterion. Our proposal has the potential to reveal groups with general shapes and structure in a dataset. We demonstrate good performance on several simulated and real datasets.
Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation.

Recent work in cognitive and social psychology makes it clear that emotion plays a critical role in public perceptions of risk, but doesn't make clear exactly what that role is or why it matters. This Article examines two competing theories of risk perception, which generate two corresponding understandings of emotion and its significance for risk regulation. The "irrational weigher9' theory asserts that laypersons1 emotional apprehensions of risk are heuristic substitutes for more reflective judgments, and as such lead to systematic errors. It therefore counsels that risk regulation be assigned to politically insulated experts whose judgments are free of emotion's distorting impact. The "cultural evaluator" theory, in contrast, asserts that emotional apprehensions of risk reflect persons' expressive appraisals of putatively dangerous activities. It implies that emotional apprehensions of risk should at least sometimes be afforded normative weight in law and also generates distinctive strategies for reconciling sound risk regulation with genuinely participatory, democratic policymaking.
A political economy model of congressional careers

Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we assess reelection probabilities, estimate the effect of congressional experience on private and public sector wages, and quantify the value of congressional seat. Moreover, we assess how an increase in the congressional wage or the imposition of term limits would affect the career decisions of politicians and the returns from a career in Congress.
Lessons Learned from Teaching Clinical Legal Education in Thailand

Introduction All around the globe, legal educators, law students, consumers of legal services and others in the legal community are debating reforms to legal education, prompted1 by external demands on the profession, the need for law graduates to be competent in rapidly developing areas of law, and changes in practice due to globalization and technology.2 The drum beat for change is familiar by now in the United States, with a renewed interest in curricular reform that seeks to balance teaching students foundational legal knowledge with important lawyering skills and professional values.3 In Asia, in particular,
Supplying the Adverb: The Future of Corporate Risk-Taking and the Business Judgment Rule

The business judgment rule precludes judicial review of most decisions by corporate directors. The rule is necessary to protect directors from potential liability for "good faith" decisions that ultimately end in failure. Courts and legal commentators have long emphasized the importance that the rule has in promoting the kind of risk-taking by corporations that has resulted in new ideas, new technologies and new markets. In recent years, Delaware courts have shown so much deference to risk-taking that they have misapplied the still-evolving doctrine of good faith. Professor Rosenberg argues that courts should use the same standards of good faith to evaluate accusations of excessive risk-taking that they use to evaluate other kinds of director misconduct such as disloyalty and a failure to be adequately informed. This would go a long way to making Delaware fiduciary law more consistent as it is applied to a variety of alleged director misconduct, but would do little to damage the ability of directors to take the kind of beneficial risks that have been so central to the historical success of the American corporation.
A Contractual Approach to Investor-State Regulatory Disputes

International investment arbitral tribunals are increasingly tasked with resolving regulatory disputes. This relatively new form of dispute involves a challenge by a foreign investor to a host state’s generally applicable regulation, enacted in good faith to promote the public interest but resulting incidentally in harm to the investor’s business. Such claims typically invoke the “fair and equitable treatment” standard provided for in the bilateral investment treaty between the host state and the investor’s home state. The dominant view among commentators, and increasingly among the tribunals themselves, is that regulatory disputes should be analyzed within a public law framework, using tools derived from constitutional or administrative law. That means, for example, balancing the investor’s rights and host state’s regulatory concerns as part of a proportionality analysis. I argue that the public law approach is flawed because it requires tribunals to weigh incommensurable values and ultimately to make policy judgments when they lack the expertise and legitimacy to do so. This Article proposes that tribunals instead draw on tools from contract law and theory to approximate what the contracting states intended when they agreed to a fair and equitable treatment standard. The investment treaties themselves give no guidance on how that standard should be applied to regulatory disputes. When courts confront similar gaps in contracts, they do not simply abandon the inquiry into the parties’ intent but instead apply additional tools or principles to form the best possible estimate. The Article explores three specific tools: a default rule approach and two default standards derived from contract law’s analysis of changed circumstances. More generally, I argue that a contractual approach, by focusing tribunals on the contracting states’ intent rather than requiring them to independently assess the substance of a host state’s policy, will facilitate more principled reasoning as well as enhance the tribunals’ legitimacy, and thereby better promote the goals of international investment in the long run.
Transition probabilities of Co II, weak lines to the ground and low metastable levels

New branching fraction (BF) measurements based primarily on data from a cross-dispersed echelle spectrometer are reported for 84 lines of Co ii. The BFs for 82 lines are converted to absolute atomic transition probabilities using radiative lifetimes from laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) measurements on 19 upper levels of the lines. A lifetime of 3.3(2) ns for the z5D0 level is used based on LIF measurements for lifetimes of the four other levels in the z5D term. Twelve of the eighty-four lines are weak transitions connecting to the ground and low metastable levels of Co+. Another 46 lines are strong transitions connecting to the ground and low metastable levels of Co+. For these lines, log(gf) values were measured in earlier studies and, with a few exceptions, are confirmed in this study. Such lines, if unblended in stellar spectra, have the potential to yield Co abundance values unaffected by any breakdown of the local thermodynamic equilibrium approximation in stellar photospheres because the ground and low metastable levels of Co+ are the primary population reservoirs of Co in the photospheres of interest. Weak lines, if unblended, are useful in photospheres with high Co abundance, and strong lines are useful in metal-poor photospheres. New hyperfine structure A constants for 28 levels of ionized Co from least-squares fits to Fourier transform spectra line profiles are reported. These laboratory data are applied to re-determine the Co abundance in the metal-poor halo star HD 84937. BFs and transition probabilities for 19 lines are reported for the first time.
How low spending control harms consumers

Self-control is a critical aspect of consumer behavior that has wide-ranging implications for individual and societal welfare. The present research builds upon previous work regarding consumer spending self-control by examining the financial, decision making, social, and psychological consequences of low consumer spending self-control. Further, the relationship between consumer spending self-control and general self-control is explored, contributing to a greater understanding of how more general traits translate into spending-related outcomes. This research includes investigations of allocations to retirement accounts, responses to credit limits, resource depletion effects from repeated decision making, and the potential for broader negative social and psychological consequences from low consumer spending self-control.
Should we Fear the Shadow? House Prices, Shadow Inventory, and the Nascent Housing Recovery

Although a broad-based increase in house prices has been observed over the past year, not everyone is convinced the rise of house prices will persist and lead to a steady recovery of the economy. The main reason for this skepticism is uncertainty about the “shadow inventory”: foreclosed homes held by investors or as REOs, which have not yet hit the market but likely will as market prices rise. The volume of shadow inventory itself in local markets is largely unknown, as is its impact on the housing market. This study quantifies the size of the shadow inventory and investigates the spatial impact of the out-flow of shadow inventory. The scope of our study is a set of housing markets (AZ, CA, and FL) that vary in both their historic housing price volatility as well as institutional factors - such as foreclosure law statutes - that may influence the relationship between the shadow inventory and house price dynamics. To address the endogeneity that characterizes the spatial interaction of house prices and the out-flow of the shadow inventory, we utilize a simultaneous equation system of spatial autoregressions (SESSAR). The model is estimated using measures of the shadow inventory derived from DataQuick’s national transaction history database and county-level house price indices provided by Black Knight. Lastly, because our estimate - as well as all other existing estimates - of the shadow inventory relies upon string matching algorithms to identify entry into and exit out of REO status, we validate the accuracy of our measures of REOs using loss mitigation data from the OCC Mortgage Metrics database.
Defined Contribution Pension Plans: Determinants of Participation and Contributions Rates

Records of 793,794 employees eligible to participate in 647 defined contribution pension plans are studied. About 71% of them choose to participate in the plans, and of the participants, 12% choose to contribute the maximum allowed, $10,500. The main findings are (other things equal) (1) participation rates, contributions and (most remarkably) savings rates increase with compensation; on average, a $10,000 increase in compensation is associated with a 3.7% higher participation probability and $900 higher contribution; (2) women's participation probability is 6.5% higher than men's and they contribute almost $500 more than men; (3) participation probabilities are similar for employees covered and not covered by DB plans, but those covered by DB plans contribute more to the DC plans; (4) the availability of a match by the employer increases employees' participation and contributions; the effect is strongest for low-income employees; (v) participation rates, especially among low-income employees, are higher when company stock is an investable fund.
Stakeholder Marketing: Beyond the Four Ps and the Customer

Abstract To better understand the full impact of marketing on society, there is an urgent need for new research that looks beyond customers as the target of marketing activities and firms as the primary intended beneficiary. A consortium of leading scholars and practitioners was convened to discuss how adopting a stakeholder perspective gives birth to a host of research questions that are relevant to the broader academic community.
A note on first step analysis and rangeland management under uncertainty

Recently, Batabyal and Godfrey (J. Range-Manage. 55 (2002) 12) have used a discrete-time Markov chain model to analyse the problem of rangeland management under uncertainty. In the present note, I continue this line of inquiry. In particular, I first show how the technique of first step analysis can be used to derive a time-based objective function for a range manager. Next, I discuss aspects of the decision problem faced by a range manager who wishes to optimize the above objective function and thereby minimize the cost to society from range desertification.
The Attorney-Client Privilege as an Obstacle to the Professional and Ethical Development of Law Students

The attorney-client privilege ordinarily does not apply to law students, or protect secrets disclosed to attorneys in the presence of unnecessary third parties. Because the law treats law students the same as other third parties, a law student's presence in a client meeting can destroy the attorney-client privilege. For law students, for legal educators, and for the public interest in having skilled and ethical lawyers, this is an absurd result. Experiential learning is critical for acquiring necessary legal practice skills, but law schools struggle with the costs of providing hands-on learning opportunities. Yet restrictive privilege rules limit the kinds of partnerships between law schools and the practicing bar that could provide meaningful experiential learning opportunities. Although attorneys have an ethical duty to promote legal education, they cannot jeopardize their clients' rights. This article proposes reform of the privilege waiver rules in light of the needs of modern legal education.