cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Timing of Analysts' Earnings Forecasts

ABSTRACT: Existing literature assumes that the order and timing of analysts' earnings forecasts are determined exogenously. However, analysts choose when to issue their forecasts. This study develops a model that endogenizes the timing decision of analysts and analyzes their equilibrium timing strategies. In the model, analysts face a trade‐off between the timeliness and the precision of their forecasts. The model introduces a timing game with two analysts, derives and analyzes its unique pure strategies equilibrium, and provides new empirical predictions about the precision and timing of analysts' forecasts. The equilibrium has one of two patterns: either the times of the analysts' forecasts cluster, or there is a separation in the times of the forecasts. The less informed and less similar the analysts are, the more likely it is that they forecast at different points in time. All else equal, analysts with a higher precision of initial private information tend to forecast earlier, and analysts with a high...
Religious Symbols and Religious Garb in the Courtroom: Personal Values and Public Judgments

As a nation that values and guarantees religious freedom, the United States is often faced with questions regarding the public display of religious symbols. Such questions have arisen in a number of Supreme Court cases, involving both Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause issues. Since 1984, the Court has considered the constitutionality of the display of religious symbols such as a creche, a menorah, and a cross in public areas. The Court has also considered the constitutionality of Air Force regulations that prohibited a clinical psychologist from wearing a yarmulke. Parallel to the Supreme Court cases, a number of federal and state courts have been faced with cases involving the display of religious symbols in the courtroom. These cases also include Establishment Clause issues, relating to a court's display of symbols such as the Ten Commandments, as well as Free Exercise Clause issues, involving the rights of parties, witnesses, and attorneys to dress in religious garb in the courtroom. At the same time, these courts have often considered the potential for juror prejudice that may result from the display of religious symbols in the courtroom. Levine surveys and analyzes the decisions courts have reached in addressing these issues. Part I of the Article discusses the rights of parties to wear religious garb in the courtroom. Despite some notable exceptions, most courts have protected this right, finding that it would not unduly interfere with courtroom decorum or improperly prejudice a jury. Part II observes that, in contrast, courts have not been as willing to protect the rights of witnesses and attorneys to dress in religious garb in the courtroom. Part III discusses the display of religious symbols in courtrooms, and the different approaches courts have employed in considering this issue, in light of Establishment Clause questions as well as potential juror prejudice. This Article concludes with the hope that courts will have the wisdom to issue judgments that carefully balance the competing interests in a way that protects both the value of religious freedom and the values of fairness and equality.
Guns and butter? Fighting violence with the promise of development

There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest anti-poverty programs, India's NREGS, on the intensity of Maoist conflict. We find short-run increases of insurgency-related violence, police-initiated attacks, and insurgent attacks on civilians. We discuss how these results relate to established theories in the literature. One mechanism consistent with the empirical patterns is that NREGS induces civilians to share more information with the state, improving police effectiveness.
Merger Settlement and Enforcement Policy for Optimal Deterrence and Maximum Welfare

Merger enforcement today relies on settlements more than litigation to resolve anticompetitive concerns. The impact of settlement policy on welfare and the proper goals of settlement policy are highly controversial. Some argue that gun-shy agencies settle for too little, while others argue that agencies use their power to delay to extract overreaching settlement terms, even when mergers are not welfare reducing. This Article uses decision theory to throw light on this controversy. The goal of this Article is to formulate and analyze agency merger enforcement and settlement commitment policies in the face of imperfect information, litigation costs, and delay risks by the merging parties, agencies, and the courts. The Article explains why limiting the goal of merger enforcement and agency settlement policy simply to avoid welfare harms, but nothing more, is flawed as a matter of both law and policy and would compromise deterrence. The decision-theoretic analysis distinguishes two types of agency commitment policies: a short-run optimal policy that focuses only the specific merger proposal being evaluated and a long-run optimal policy that takes into account effects on future mergers and deterrence goals. The short-run optimal policy may lead to some welfare-reducing settlements by a rationally gun-shy agency; settlement demands for weakly welfareenhancing merger proposals, what might be called “exacting tribute”; and “anti-deterrence” effects by merging firms proposing some mergers with greater welfare harm in order to increase settlement bargaining leverage. In contrast, a disciplined long-run optimal policy would clear all welfareenhancing mergers as proposed; forgo negative welfare settlements despite the risk of losing in court, but instead demand settlements on welfarereducing merger proposals sufficient to lead to strict welfare increases (not just welfare neutrality), relative to no merger; and avoid anti-deterrence by
The wealth effects of dividend announcements on bondholders: New evidence from the over-the-counter market

Abstract This paper investigates the announcement effect of dividend changes on bondholders using bond transaction data from the over-the-counter market. Abnormal bond returns over a three-day event window are positive surrounding dividend increase announcements and negative surrounding dividend omission announcements. The bond market reaction to the dividend increases is more positive for larger dividend increases, speculative grade bonds and the period from 2008 to 2010. Most of the results are consistent with the signaling hypothesis. Additionally, bond market reactions to dividend decreases and initiations are insignificant. The stock market reacts negatively to dividend decreases and positively to dividend initiations. The bond and stock market reactions to dividend decreases and initiations suggest that there is also a wealth transfer effect.
Discussion of “The implications of unverifiable fair-value accounting: Evidence from the political economy of goodwill accounting”

Abstract Ramanna [2007. The implications of unverifiable fair-value accounting: evidence from the political economy of goodwill accounting, Journal of Accounting and Economics] provides interesting and novel evidence on how firms use contributions from their political action committees (PACs) to members of Congress as a means of lobbying for preferred positions on the two exposure drafts that led to SFAS-141 and SFAS-142. My discussion raises some concerns about his main conclusion: that pooling firms lobbied the FASB to obtain a “fair-value”-based impairment rule to facilitate their ability to manipulate financial statements. I offer a more benign explanation and make some other observations about how this line of research could proceed in the future.
Smart Growth and Sustainable Development: Threads of a National Land Use Policy

This article is intended to shift attention away from the growing literature on state smart growth issues and focus on the continuing interest at the federal level with respect to land use planning and smart-growth issues. Although the article does not advocate a national land use policy, it does demonstrate that there has been a de facto national policy and agenda in the making in the nation’s capital under the guise of sustainable development and that this is merely an extension of the historical federal interest and influence in land use policy.
Information, Bias, and Mediation Success*

Why do some mediation episodes produce successful negotiated settlements between the disputants of international conflict while others fail to achieve success? This article examines how certain characteristics of a mediator, that is, a mediator’s information about the disputants and a mediator’s bias toward them, affect the success of mediation of international conflicts. By drawing a conceptual distinction between absolute and relative bias and measuring the type of information that is relevant for mediation success, I demonstrate that both the degree of bias a mediator holds toward the disputants and the degree of information a mediator has about the disputants are significant predictors of mediation success.
On the Nature of Self‐Assessed House Prices

In models of optimal household behavior, the value of housing affects consumption, savings and other variables. But homeowners do not know the value of their house for certain until they sell, so while they live in their home they must rely on local house price data to estimate its value. This article uses data from the recent housing boom and bust to demonstrate that changes in households' self-assessed home values are strongly consistent with the predictions of a model in which households optimally filter available house price data. Specifically, we show that self-assessed house prices did not increase as rapidly as house price indexes during the boom and did not decline as severely during the bust. A Kalman filter model nearly perfectly replicates these data. These findings have direct implications for economists studying asking prices during booms and busts, optimal default decisions and other key housing-related phenomena.
Advancing “A Charter for a Vibrant Democracy”

This review of Money, Politics, and the Constitution: Beyond Citizens United, soon to appear in the Election Law Journal, canvasses this collection of state-of-the-art essays on campaign finance reform. It briefly touches on many of them but principally focuses on three: the essays by Robert Post and Richard Pildes, which open the collection, and the one by Burt Neuborne that concludes it. These essays exhibit a certain double-sidedness, I argue. That is, those against campaign finance reform might embrace the principles the authors lay down but reach very different conclusions in application. Although such double-sidedness might at first surprise in a collection of essays commissioned by the Brennan Center, an institutional champion of campaign finance reform, I argue that this “double vision” should actually be expected and represents a step forward in the debates over campaign finance reform.
Citizenship, Standing, and Immigration Law

Courts and commentators typically evaluate constitutional immigration law from the perspective of aliens. But that approach pays insufficient attention to the ways immigration law affects the interests and rights of citizens. In particular, an alien-centered approach fails to consider the central role immigration law plays in national self-definition and, consequently, ignores the possibility that immigration law may injure citizens by defining the national political community in constitutionally impermissible ways. Considering federal immigration law from the perspective of citizens, this Article demonstrates that immigration policy, which contemporary constitutional doctrine largely insulates from attack, should not be immune to challenges by citizens. And contrary to the thrust of contemporary doctrine, courts should scrutinize immigration policy for compliance with conventional constitutional norms when citizens' rights are at stake.
Reconceiving the Patent Rocket Docket: An Empirical Study of Infringement Litigation 1985-2010

This Article presents the first survival model for systematically identifying and comparing United States district courts as patent rocket dockets, and for examining related trends in patent litigation. The conventional wisdom of rocket docket status in a judicial district tends to rely on average case disposition times and the availability of court rules for patent cases, as well as anecdotal information about well-known jurists with experience in patent adjudication. By comparison, this Article approaches rocket dockets through a quantitative investigation of recent historical trends in patent case filings as well as through market concentration analysis at the district court and circuit court levels of patent case filings. Most significantly, the Article provides an indexed ranking of district courts derived from survival analysis of case dispositions, marginal pendency, and court capacity based on data from over 44,000 patent infringement cases litigated during the 1985-2010 period. The results confirm that the currently prominent rocket dockets are, indeed, the Eastern District of Texas, the Eastern District of Virginia, and-most recently-the Western District of Wisconsin. The results also suggest, inter alia, that the Middle District of Florida and the Western District of Washington are emerging patent rocket dockets. The Article concludes with an outlook for future study on the differential effect of technology classes on case disposition speed within this framework. Copyright © 2011 The John Marshall Law School Cite as Saurabh Vishnubhakat, Reconceiving the Patent Rocket Docket: An Empirical Study of Infringement Litigation 1985-2010, 11 J. MARSHALL REV. INTELL. PROP. L. 58 (2011). RECONCEIVING THE PATENT ROCKET DOCKET: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF INFRINGEMENT LITIGATION 1985-2010 SAURABH VISHNUBHAKAT INTRODUCTION 60 1. ROCKET DOCKETS IN PATENT LAW 61 A. Conventional Wisdom and the Big Three Patent Fora 61 1. Alexandria, Virginia 61 2. Marshall, Texas 64 3. Madison, Wisconsin 67 B. What it Means to be a Rocket Docket 68 C. Judicial Specialization and Forum Shopping 70 II. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF INFRINGEMENT LITIGATION 1985-2010 72 A. Dataset and Methodology 72 1. Survival Analysis 73 2. Concentration Analysis 75 B. Findings and Discussion 76 1. Survival Analysis 76 2. Concentration Analysis 7 III. CONCLUSION 80 APPENDIX 81
Ideology and Exceptionalism in Intellectual Property: An Empirical Study

Can Supreme Court justices’ views on abortion, racial profiling, and medical malpractice predict how they will vote in intellectual property cases? It may be natural to assume that a justice’s views on those topics are irrelevant; they are, after all, unrelated legal fields. It is certainly the dominant view among intellectual property (IP) scholars that copyright, patent, and trademark cases hinge on doctrinal rules and policy issues specific to IP. However, legal realists and political scientists have shown that judges are strongly influenced by political ideology and that judges’ ideological positions are consistent across diverse issue areas. The question then becomes: is IP the exception to the attitudinalist rule that ideology affects case outcomes? This Article challenges the widely held belief that IP cases are immune from the influence of judicial ideology, a belief we call “IP exceptionalism.” Judicial attitudes towards IP have become increasingly important. The Supreme Court’s 2006–2007 term witnessed a remarkable number of major cases that raised fundamental questions in relation to both the acquisition and the legitimate exercise of IP rights. The increasing attention given to intellectual property issues by the Supreme Court is not surprising, considering
Policy Reform and the Free-Rider Problem

We investigate policy reform in a modelwith both lobbying, which involves afree-rider problem, and ordinary rentseeking, which does not. These activitiesinvolve similar skills, so a reform whichreduces rents shifts labor into lobbying.Also, because of the free-rider problem,the marginal return to the industry fromlobbying may greatly exceed an individualfirm's return to lobbying. Thus, the shiftinto lobbying caused by rent reduction maylead to large increases in transfers to thelobbying industry. Under somecircumstances, a reform which reducesavailable rents increases total rents plustransfers to the industry.
Asymmetric Price Adjustment and Economic Fluctuations

This paper considers a possible explanation for asymmetric adjustment of nominal prices. The authors present a menu-cost model in which positive trend inflation causes firms' relative prices to decline automatically between price adjustments. In this environment, shocks that raise firms' desired prices trigger larger price responses than shocks that lower desired prices. The authors use this model of asymmetric adjustment to address three issues in macroeconomics: the effects of aggregate demand, the effects of sectoral shocks, and the optimal rate of inflation. Copyright 1994 by Royal Economic Society.
On turning waves for the inhomogeneous Muskat problem: A computer-assisted proof

We exhibit a family of graphs that develop turning singularities (i.e. their Lipschitz seminorm blows up and they cease to be a graph, passing from the stable to the unstable regime) for the inhomogeneous, two-phase Muskat problem where the permeability is given by a nonnegative step function. We study the influence of different choices of the permeability and different boundary conditions (both at infinity and considering finite/infinite depth) in the development or prevention of singularities for short time. In the general case (inhomogeneous, confined) we prove a bifurcation diagram concerning the appearance or not of singularities when the depth of the medium and the permeabilities change. The proofs are carried out using a combination of classical analysis techniques and computer-assisted verification.
WI-FI Everywhere: Universal Broadband Access as Antitrust and Telecommunications Policy

Introduction 1698 I. The Development and Market Structure of the Broadband Industry 1705 A. Broadband Access in its Historical Context 1705 B. From Dial-Up to Broadband Internet Access 1711 C. Natural Monopoly and Network Industry Characteristics of Broadband 1715 D. The Lack of Effective Competition in Many Broadband Markets 1720 II. Broadband Deregulation and the Supreme Court’s Telecommunications Trilogy of 2004-2005 1726 A. Historical Context of the Telecommunications Trilogy.1726 B. State Law Restraints on Municipal Broadband: Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League (2004) 1728 C. Monopolization of Telecommunications Markets: Verizon Communications LLC v. Law Offices of Curtis V. Trinko (2004) 1736 D. The End of Open Access?: National Cable and Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services (2005) 1751 III. All Legal Prohibitions on Municipal Broadband Should Be Lifted 1762
Sovereignty as Discourse

Studies of language and its relationship to democratic constitutionalism have yielded a number of insights, but major contributions have been harder to come by. This may be partially explained by the multiplicity of disciplines from which a theorist might draw to investigate this nexus. It might also be attributed to the varying degrees of seriousness with which synthetic treatments have been undertaken. There certainly is no shortage of possibilities for language to play within a theory of constitutionalism. Words can serve purely an instrumental function in the resolution of issues or the broader elaboration of democratic "principles," "intentions," "expectations," or "values"; they may be constitutive of legal ideas or broader affinities; or they might shape, delimit, or organize the range of political and legal possibilities open to certain institutions or society as a whole. On to this landscape appears Howard Schweber's learned and ambitious book, The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism. Professor Schweber, who teaches political theory and law at the University of Wisconsin, takes seriously the proposition that the relationship between language and constitutionalism must be both carefully investigated and normatively justified. Arguing from within liberal theory, he boldly argues that "the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime depends on a prior commitment to employ constitutional language, and that such a commitment is both the necessary and the sufficient condition for constitution making" (p. 7).
Statistical inference as a bargaining game

Abstract This paper extends the analogy previously established by E. Leamer, between a Bayesian inference problem and an economics allocation problem, and shows that posterior modes can be interpreted as optimal outcomes of a bargaining game. This bargaining game, over a parameter value, is played between two players: the researcher, with preferences represented by the prior, and the data, with preferences represented by the likelihood.
The Nuremberg Roles of Justice Robert H. Jackson

During 1945-1946, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson served, by appointment of President Truman, as U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg of the principal surviving Nazi war criminals. This article, based on a lecture at Washington University’s conference on the 60th anniversary of that trial before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), introduces Jackson the person and the public figure. It then considers some of the facets and roles that the Nuremberg trial year was in and for Jackson: the project’s importance; relevant background; ambition; self-sacrifice; commitment to law; innocence and optimism; constant recalibration; eloquent, effective voice; international diplomacy; the London Agreement and IMT Charter; dream (and nightmare) staffing; the Nuremberg indictment; life and work in Allied-occupied former Germany; building and prosecuting the case; effective trial work; vengeance foresworn; seeing the job through; and victory.
Neighborhood violence, poverty, and psychological well-being

Abstract We estimate the relationship between neighborhood violence and psychological well-being using nationally representative panel data from South Africa. We use data on household-level perceptions of neighborhood violence as well as reported crimes and local media reports to measure violence. First, we find the poor live in neighborhoods that they perceive to have higher levels of violence and have objectively more violence. Second, higher levels of both perceived and objective violence are strongly linked to elevated depressive symptoms and an increased likelihood of being at risk of depression. Finally, we show that living in urban neighborhoods with high levels of violence while poor is predictive of future poverty in our sample.
Percentage Rents and Stand-Alone Property: Share Contracting as a Barrier to Entry

Share (percentage rent) lease contracts have not been explained in the case of stand-alone property. To do so we develop a model of a local trade area with an incumbent retail tenant that makes non...
Securing property rights in transition: Lessons from implementation of China's rural land contracting law

This paper is motivated by the emphasis on secure property rights as a determinant of economic development in recent literature. The authors use village and household level information from about 800 villages throughout China to explore whether legal reform increased protection of land rights against unauthorized reallocation or expropriation with below-average compensation by the state. The analysis provides nation-wide evidence on a sensitive topic. The authors find positive impacts, equivalent to increasing land values by 30 percent, of reform even in the short term. Reform originated in villages where democratic election of leaders ensured a minimum level of accountability, pointing toward complementarity between good governance and legal reform. The paper explores the implications for situations where individuals and groups hold overlapping rights to land.
Forecasting Taxes: New Evidence from Analysts

ABSTRACT: We provide new evidence about how analysts incorporate and improve on management ETR forecasts. Quarterly ETR reporting under the integral method provides mandatory point-estimate forecasts by management, but firms must record certain “discrete” tax items fully in the quarter in which they occur, polluting these forecasts. We investigate management ETR accuracy, analysts' decisions to mimic management's estimate, analysts' accuracy relative to each other or to management, and dispersion. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that analysts deviate from management more and are more accurate relative to management as complexity increases, with real effects on EPS accuracy and dispersion. In contrast to prior research that analysts ignore or are confused by taxes, we provide evidence that analysts pay attention to taxes and improve on management estimates. Based on our evidence that management's quarterly ETRs have less predictive value in the presence of discrete items, we suggest standard-setters ree...
Management Accounting Education: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

For the past 35 years I have been teaching management accounting to undergraduate students, graduate students, and M.B.A. students. My approach to the topic has evolved over the years as my understanding of management accounting and of management decision making has expanded. The real world of business has always fascinated me, and I take every opportunity I can to visit companies to view their operations and to talk with managers about the problems and issues they face. Management accountants at companies like Caterpillar, Inc., Nortel, Dresser (now a division of Halliburton Co.), and numerous other companies have helped me to learn about the ways that management accounting works in organizations. The more I learn about the practice of management accounting the more dissatisfied I become with what I teach in my courses, so my class material is constantly evolving to accommodate my everchanging understanding of management accounting. As my knowledge of management accounting deepens I find myself discussin...
Relative spread and price discovery

Abstract We establish the importance of relative minimum price increments for price discovery in the context of a single asset trading at diverse venues. Our model relates relative spreads to directed information flows and begets a set of testable implications. Although conventional wisdom dictates that futures prices lead equities, our model predicts the opposite should be true when particular relative price conditions hold for the bids and offers of each asset. We develop an empirical measure of price discovery which is suited to asynchronous, high-frequency financial data and test the model predictions. Empirical evidence strongly supports the relative spread mechanism.
The Tiger Awakens: The Tumultuous Transformation of India’s Patent System and the Rise of Indian Pharmaceutical Innovation

The first day of January 2005 marked a dramatic turning point in the history of India. By deliberately excluding pharmaceutical products from patent protection for the previous 34 years, India became a world leader in high-quality generic drug manufacturing. But India’s entry into the global economy at the end of the 20th century, as evidenced by membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), compelled the nation to once again award patents on drugs. Moreover, India henceforth would have to apply internationally-accepted criteria for granting patents, and the term of its patents would have to extend twenty years beyond filing.
Massive star and star cluster formation

I review the status of massive star formation theories: accretion from collapsing, massive, turbulent cores; competitive accretion; and stellar collisions. I conclude the observational and theoretical evidence favors the first of these models. I then discuss: the initial conditions of star cluster formation as traced by infrared dark clouds; the cluster formation timescale; and comparison of the initial cluster mass function in different galactic environments.
Stability and Preference Alignment in Matching and Coalition Formation

We study matching and coalition formation environments allowing complementarities and peer effects. Agents have preferences over coalitions, and these preferences vary with an underlying, and commonly known, state of nature. Assuming that there is substantial variability of preferences across states of nature, we show that there exists a core stable coalition structure in every state if and only if agents' preferences are pairwise‐aligned in every state. This implies that there is a stable coalition structure if agents' preferences are generated by Nash bargaining over coalitional outputs. We further show that all stability‐inducing rules for sharing outputs can be represented by a profile of agents' bargaining functions and that agents match assortatively with respect to these bargaining functions. This framework allows us to show how complementarities and peer effects overturn well known comparative statics of many‐to‐one matching.
Dividend-Price Ratios and Stock Returns: Another Look at the History

A critical question for investors is the extent to which the expected returns on common stock are predictable. One of the prime pieces of evidence supporting the hypothesis that returns are predictable is that regressions of future returns on dividend-price ratios are highly significant, but future dividend growth is unrelated to the ratio. This article presents an alternate interpretation of these regression results that is consistent with the original version of the efficient market hypothesis, which holds that expected returns are unpredictable. The analysis is based on the economic history of the United States. The historical analysis not only provides an alternative interpretation of the regression results, but also highlights the importance of analyzing the specific historical events responsible for generating financial data.
Citizen Suits and Sustainability

The article explores what we can learn about sustainable development, and the progress the United States has already made or not made, by looking at citizen suits under United States environmental law. The article focuses on four aspects of citizen suits: the manner in which they allow access to U.S. courts, the rules concerning standing to sue, the purposes of the laws that have provisions authorizing citizen enforcement, and the extent to which we would want such provisions in a world that has reached some form of sustainable development.Citizen suits are an important part of an environmentally sustainable legal system because they provide access to justice for persons injured by violations of environmental laws. The law of standing requires plaintiffs to allege injury to their uses of the environment as a result of the defendant's use or misuse of the environment. It thus suggests, in rough terms, competition between sustainable uses and unsustainable uses. The plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978) provide a useful example of that point. The environmental laws being enforced in citizen suits tend to be based on a damage control model of environmental protection, largely to reduce economic and social costs. In a sustainable society, by contrast, economic development could help drive both greater environmental protection and greater social well-being. Moreover, environmental protection in a sustainable society would be based on the full range of laws and policies that affect the environment, not just environmental regulation. Yet even these laws would need to include citizen suit provisions of some kind, because citizen involvement is necessary for sustainable development.
The economics of baseball contraction.

In the fall of 2001, Commissioner Bud Selig announced that two teams would be eliminated from Major League Baseball. After ensuing litigation and collective bargaining, contraction has been postponed until 2007 but remains a possibility. This article examines the economics of contraction of teams in a sports league, first developing the basic welfare economics of expansion and contraction and then investigating whether the private incentives of existing teams lead to inefficient contraction decisions. The core finding is that, using financial information from the 2001 season, all teams in Major League Baseball probably generate positive net social benefits, but the existing teams will benefit by approximately $1 billion from the elimination of the two weakest teams.
A Simple Exponential Model for Dependent Defaults

A thorough understanding of the joint default behavior of credit-risky securities is essential for credit risk measurement as well as the valuation of many credit derivatives and collateralized debt obligations. A simple and tractable intensity-based model predicts correlated defaults in which unpredictable default arrival times are jointly exponentially distributed. All relevant results are given in closed form, so the model can be easily implemented. The efficient simulation of dependent default times for pricing and risk management purposes is straightforward as well. Parameter calibration relies on market data as well as data from the rating agencies and credit risk management solutions.
The Role of Pre-Entry Experience, Entry Timing, and Product Technology Strategies in Explaining Firm Survival

Studying the U.S. personal computer industry from its inception in 1974 through 1994, we address the following questions. What product technology strategies increase the survival chances of entrants into new, technologically dynamic industries? Does the effectiveness of these strategies differ by pre-entry experience? Does the effectiveness of these strategies differ by when firms enter a new industry? Consistent with the published literature, we find that diversifying entrants have an initial survival advantage over entrepreneurial startups. But, we find the reverse for later entrants: startups that enter later in the industry have a survival advantage over the later entering diversifying entrants. We explain this finding in terms of the firms' product technology strategies (i.e., offering products based on the technology standard and products incorporating the latest technology), pre-entry experience, and entry timing. Our findings highlight that it is crucial to study what firms do after they enter a new industry to more completely understand their ultimate performance.
The Gravity Model

Gravity has long been one of the most successful empirical models in economics. Incorporating deeper theoretical foundations of gravity into recent practice has led to a richer and more accurate estimation and interpretation of the spatial relations described by gravity. Wider acceptance has followed. Recent developments are reviewed here, and suggestions are made for promising future research.
A semiparametric model for binary response and continuous outcomes under index heteroscedasticity

SUMMARY This paper formulates a likelihood-based estimator for a double-index, semiparametric binary response equation. A novel feature of this estimator is that it is based on density estimation under local smoothing. While the proofs differ from those based on alternative density estimators, the finite sample performance of the estimator is significantly improved. As binary responses often appear as endogenous regressors in continuous outcome equations, we also develop an optimal instrumental variables estimator in this context. For this purpose, we specialize the double-index model for binary response to one with heteroscedasticity that depends on an index different from that underlying the ‘mean response’. We show that such (multiplicative) heteroscedasticity, whose form is not parametrically specified, effectively induces exclusion restrictions on the outcomes equation. The estimator developed exploits such identifying information. We provide simulation evidence on the favorable performance of the estimators and illustrate their use through an empirical application on the determinants, and affect, of attendance at a government-financed school. Copyright  2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Minnie Liddell's Forty-Year Quest for Quality Public Education Remains a Dream Deferred

This Article is a historic account of the hopes and dreams that a mother had for her children and her efforts to make those hopes and dreams come true. The mother, Minnie Liddell, never imagined, when she first became a mom in 1959, or years later after the birth of her fifth child, or even after she filed a lawsuit against a city school district, that she would become a pioneer and icon in the school desegregation history of St. Louis, Missouri. She really only wanted a quality public education for her children, for black children, for all children. This Article will tell the story of Mrs. Liddell’s quest for a quality education for her children, it will look at the twenty-seven year court case and it will take a look at where the journey for quality education stands in St. Louis today.
Capital Inflows, Exchange Rate Flexibility, and Credit Booms*

Historically, capital flow bonanzas have often fueled sharp credit expansions in advanced and emerging market economies alike. Focusing primarily on emerging markets, this paper analyzes the impact of exchange rate flexibility on credit markets during periods of large capital inflows. It is shown that bank credit is larger and its composition tilts to foreign currency in economies with less flexible exchange rate regimes, and that these results are not explained entirely by the fact that the latter attract more capital inflows than economies with more flexible regimes. The findings thus suggest countries with less flexible exchange rate regimes may stand to benefit the most from regulatory policies that reduce banks' incentives to tap external markets and to lend/borrow in foreign currency; these policies include marginal reserve requirements on foreign lending, currency-dependent liquidity requirements and higher capital requirement and/or dynamic provisioning on foreign exchange loans.
MACRO LESSONS FROM MICROSTRUCTURE

Empirical research on the microeconomics of currency markets, an area known sometimes as ‘currency market microstructure,’ has taken off in the past decade. This paper extracts from this research four lessons for modelling short-run exchange-rate dynamics. First, currency flows are a key determinant of exchange rates, and models should have these flows fully in focus. The appropriate equilibrium condition may be flow-currency supply equals flow-currency demand. Second, the flows of first-order relevance include those of ‘financial’ traders, who use currencies essentially as a store of value, and ‘commercial’ traders, who use currencies as a medium of exchange. Financial flows and commercial flows should be negatively related to each other, meaning that financial demand tends to be met by commercial supply. Also, financial flows should be positively related to exchange rates. Third, financial traders are motivated by profits, rather than consumption, and behave as if risk averse. Fourth, commercial traders are motivated by exchange-rate levels and rationally choose not to speculate. The workhorse models of international macroeconomics do not fit most of these lessons, and these important lacunae in their microfoundations may help explain their limited empirical success. The paper sketches an optimizing model of currency flows that is consistent with the lessons and has an encouraging empirical record. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The CIA Mandate and the War on Terror

The mandate of the Central Intelligence Agency should be reassessed and clarified in light of modern national security threats. Post-September 11 intelligence soul-searching recently produced landmark intelligence reform that will radically overhaul the American intelligence infrastructure. Yet the policy debate and recent reform efforts have paid insufficient attention to whether the fifty-nine year old mandate of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) requires amendment in light of the modern fight against terrorism. The National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, prohibited the Agency from having any "police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions." Yet these terms have not been clearly defined, despite the fact that ambiguity of mandate led to intelligence abuses during the Cold War. Statutory revision of the CIA mandate as proposed in this Note would reduce the likelihood of abuses of civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and would improve CIA cooperation with law enforcement agencies.
Cash, crime, and cryptocurrencies

Abstract In The Curse of Cash, Kenneth Rogoff lists reductions in criminal activity and tax evasion among the primary benefits of eliminating cash. We maintain that, to the extent that individuals are interested in purchasing illicit goods and services or evading taxes, eliminating cash will encourage them to switch to close substitutes. Hence, governments intent on realizing the benefits cited by Rogoff would not merely need to eliminate cash. They would also need to ban alternatives. This is especially relevant given the proliferation of cryptocurrencies, which provide a fair degree of anonymity for users.
Financial reporting incentives for conservative accounting: The influence of legal and political institutions

Abstract This paper explores financial reporting incentives created by an economy's institutional structure. The underlying premise of our analysis is that a country's legal/judicial system, securities laws, and political economy create incentives that influence the behavior of corporate executives, investors, regulators and other market participants. Further, such incentives ultimately shape the properties of reported accounting numbers. We empirically analyze relations between key characteristics of country-level institutions and the asymmetric recognition of economic gains and losses into earnings (i.e., conditional conservatism). We also provide evidence on channels through which specific institutions manifest their influence on observed conservatism.
Differences in GDP Per Capita and the Share of Intraindustry Trade: The Role of Vertically Differentiated Trade

This paper examines the relationship between per capita GDP differences and bilateral intraindustry trade shares. The relationship is negative in OLS regressions but positive in fixed-effect regressions, and evidence is presented suggesting this is due to the presence of vertically differentiated trade. The paper begins by distinguishing between vertically and horizontally differentiated trade, and then finds a positive and significant relationship between GDP per capita differences and the trade shares only in the regressions on the vertically differentiated trade shares. It is shown also that the extent to which income distributions overlap affects only the share of vertically differentiated trade.
Towards a Political Theory of International Courts and Tribunals

This essay offers a sketch of the author's political theory of international courts and tribunals. First, it suggests two basic distinctions between types of international tribunals. Second, an overview of selected political science literature is provided to introduce a more expanded view of the function of international courts. Third, the essay provides a sketch of the bounded strategic space theory as a means for understanding and explaining international courts and tribunals.
Equity Home Bias and the Euro

This paper examines explanations for the equity home bias puzzle by utilizing the introduction of the euro in 1999 as a natural experiment. The introduction of the euro and the coordination of monetary policy across the Euro Area (EA) allows for a closer examination of this puzzle. Optimal foreign equity shares are derived from a version of the CAP-M and then empirically tested using detailed data from the IMF's Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey covering the foreign equity holdings of 23 countries for the years 1997 and 2001–2004. While equity home bias has fallen worldwide over this period, by far the sharpest drop has been for intra-EA equity holdings with home bias falling from 68% to 29% between the pre and post-euro periods. Several explanations for this drop are tested, with the reduction in information asymmetries emerging as the most promising candidate.
Momentum and funding conditions

Abstract We find evidence linking return momentum with macroeconomic conditions, namely, the funding environment. We show that winners outperform losers by a significant amount in restrictive funding states, while in expansive states, winners and losers perform similarly. This pattern is consistent with changing investor preferences for winners and losers following signaled shifts in funding availability. One plausible channel for this relation is the interaction between stock-level illiquidity and funding conditions. We find that liquidity risk is significantly priced during restrictive states, especially in loser stocks. Furthermore, loser stocks become more illiquid during restrictive conditions. Both effects help explain the relative performance difference between losers and winners across funding environments. Moreover, the funding environment influences the relationship between momentum and firm characteristics, after controlling for the influence of sentiment, market states and return dispersion. Overall, transitions in funding states appear to encourage investors to revise their factor pricing decisions, which produces inter-temporal variation in momentum.
Investment without Democracy : Ruling-Party Institutionalization and Credible Commitment in Autocracies

Abstract What explains private investment in autocracies, where institutions that discourage expropriation in democracies are absent? We argue that institutionalized ruling parties allow autocrats to make credible commitments to investors. Such parties promote investment by solving collective-action problems among a designated group, who invest with the expectation that the autocrat will not attempt their expropriation. We derive conditions under which autocrats want to create such parties, and we predict that private investment and governance will be stronger in their presence. We illustrate the model by examining the institutionalization of the Chinese Communist Party.
Global Banks' Dollar Funding: A Source of Financial Vulnerability

Leading up to the global financial crisis, US dollar activity by global banks headquartered outside the United States played a crucial role in transmitting shocks originating in funding markets. Although post-crisis regulation has improved banking systems' resilience, US dollar funding remains a global vulnerability, as evidenced by strains that reemerged in March 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We show that shocks to US dollar funding costs lead to financial stress in the home economies of these global non-US banks, and to spillovers to borrowers, especially emerging economies. US dollar funding vulnerability amplifies these negative effects, while some policy-related factors act as mitigators, such as swap line arrangements between central banks and international reserve holdings. Thus, these vulnerabilities should be monitored and, to the extent possible, controlled.
Promoting public health in health care facilities.

The author reflects on public health promotion in U.S. health care facilities. He suggests that health care facilities can increase health promotion by controlling the types of food and drink that are publicly available in an effort to help reduce obesity. He argues that health care facilities should make physical activity opportunities available to patients, visitors and employees to improve their health.