cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Software ergonomics: effects of computer application design parameters on operator task performance and health

Abstract Evidence is reviewed that the operating characteristics of computer application systems, in addition to physical characteristics of display units (CRTs), are the cause of many observed effects on operator health and task effectiveness. These effects are hypothesized to occur through changes in task structure, and the man-machine redivision of labour that results when computer application systems are introduced into work setting. First, the association between task dimensions and models of operator performance effectiveness and well-being are reviewed. Second, application system design parameters that affect task structure are identified. Then, empirical evidence supporting this three-part causal linkage—application system parameters to task characteristics to operator effectiveness and health—is presented. The findings suggest that by improving dialogue quality, taking advantage of two-way communication to reduce uncertainty, using smaller and less integrated systems and matching system performan...
The degree of distortions under second-degree price discrimination

Under second-degree price discrimination, both types of consumers get efficient quantities when the net-of-cost valuation functions intersect at least once at some positive quantity and the point of intersection lies between the two peaks. Distortions can be upward or downward.
Institutional Environment and Sovereign Credit Ratings

We use a sample of 86 counties to examine the cross-sectional determinants of sovereign credit ratings. We find that the quality of a country's legal and political institutions plays a vital role in determining these ratings. A one-standard-deviation increase in our legal environment index results in an average credit rating increase of 0.466 standard deviations, even when we control for obvious factors such as GDP per capita, inflation, foreign debt per GDP, previous defaults, and general development. Although part of this effect is due to the legal environment's endogeneity, its relative importance is robust to endogeneity concerns.
Regional Initiatives: Scaling the Climate Response and Responding to Conceptions of Scale

In the absence of a coherent national policy to address global climate change, there was an emergence of new scales of environmental governance in the United States. They include regional initiativ...
Legal Representation of Birth Parents and Adoptive Parents

The Article examines the role that legal representation of birth and prospective parents may or may not play in independent domestic adoptions in furthering two primary goals that characterize ethically and humanely conducted adoptions, deliberate decision making and finality. Ideally, these two goals are complementary and can be balanced with one another. There is, however, a danger of the second goal eclipsing the first. Many state laws appear to value an increase in infant adoptions over the goal of encouraging careful deliberation. Most domestic infant adoptions involve powerful market forces as well as powerful emotional pressures, and they occur in the context of a national commitment to encourage adoptions of older children and children with special needs. Infant adoption service providers' livelihoods or profits generally depend on successfully arranging adoptions for their primary clients, who, for the most part, are relatively prosperous, well-established, and socially favored married couples whose desires to bear children have been thwarted by infertility. In their efforts to adopt, these couples often face great difficulties and pay high fees. By contrast, birth parents in the stressful situations that lead them to consider placing their infants for adoption are not an organized group and are relatively powerless and socially disfavored. To help ensure that the goals of adoption are successfully met, states' adoptions laws should make clear that attorneys may not simultaneously represent adoptive parents and birth parents. Attorneys and other adoption services providers should be required to clearly inform birth parents, orally and in acknowledged writings, that birth parents' interests are not and may not be represented by attorneys who represent prospective adoptive parents. While separate representation for birth parents is unlikely to become commonplace - and when it is funded by prospective adoptive parents, involves a danger of conflicts of interest - birth parents should be clearly informed about their right to have legal representation.
Strategic management guidance and insider trading activities

Abstract We assess whether managers engage in ex ante strategic behavior when issuing earnings forecasts in a novel context. We posit that some managers provide inaccurate downward guidance to increase the positive surprise and pricing premium at the earnings announcement, thereby maximizing profits from selling shares following the earnings announcement. In support, we document that managers are more likely to have issued prior inaccurate downward guidance when they sell more shares or increase their selling activities following the earnings announcement. Further, we show that these managers benefit economically by linking inaccurate downward guidance to greater pricing premiums at the earnings announcement date and more positive cumulative stock returns over the period from inaccurate downward guidance to subsequent earnings announcement.
How do consumer buzz and traffic in social media marketing predict the value of the firm

Consumer buzz in the form of user-generated reviews, recommendations, and blogs signals that consumer attitude and advocacy can influence firm value. Web traffic also affects brand awareness and cu...
Real Remedies for Virtual Injuries

Social networking, which offers enhancements to human lives at a low marginal cost, also contributes to dignitary and other nonpecuniary harms. Statements and images presented in electronic media can give rise to defamation, invasion of privacy, trademark infringement, and false advertising claims. Accurate enough as descriptions of harm, these doctrines do not do an adequate job of repair. An injurious communication preserved by electronic means and distributed through social networking is more likely than its spoken or paper-written counterpart to spread (a phenomenon expressed in the metaphoric adjective “viral”), to reach people whose disesteem the victim cares about, and to retain power to inflict more harm after it has been adjudicated as unlawful. Injuries in the virtual realm call for remedies that recognize how information travels through — and lingers inside — electronic media. After summarizing how current remedies for virtual injuries fail to effect repair, this Article proposes a court-annexed alternative dispute resolution scheme.
Evolving Standards of Decency: Advancing the Nature and Logic of Capital Mitigation

Several years ago, I began work on a book about the system of capital punishment in the United States, the thesis of which was that the process of death sentencing required ordinary people (as citizens, voters and, especially, as jurors) to do an extraordinary thing—participate in authorizing the killing of another person. For this reason, I argued, the system of death sentencing depended on an elaborate scaffolding of myth and misinformation designed to blur that core truth, preventing the people who participated in the process from fully understanding exactly what they were being asked to do. In the course of the background research and reading that I did as I was beginning to write, I revisited some of the landmark death penalty cases that were crucial to the development of modern capital jurisprudence. They were cases that I had not read in years. This time, however, I realized something that I had not noticed when I first read them. In three of the pivotal death penalty decisions decided in the last half century—arguably, the three pivotal decisions—Furman v. Georgia, Gregg v. Georgia, and McCleskey v. Kemp, there was literally no mitigation whatsoever presented to the jurors who sentenced the defendants to death. Moreover, this fact was apparently so insignificant to the Justices who decided the cases that not one of them saw fit to mention it anywhere in their opinions. This was especially telling and ironic in Gregg because “mitigation” was explicitly identified as one of the key components in the new and improved death penalty statutes that the Court found constitutional. And it was even more notable in McCleskey, where the Court had denied the petitioner’s challenge to the death penalty in part by emphasizing the “‘unceasing
Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question

Historians’ treatment of John Maynard Keynes’s putative anti-Semitism raises complex historiographic issues. Melvin W. Reder’s 2000 HOPE article “The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists” considered whether the term ambivalent anti-Semitism could be applied variously to John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek by arguing that those three important economists evinced attitudes or made remarks that today would be characterized as anti-Semitic. I am not concerned here to appraise Reder’s argument about whether the label “anti-Semitic,” whether “ambivalent” or not, is usefully attached to Keynes. I rather am concerned with the issue of how Keynesian historiography has dealt with the anti-Semitism question. That is, I am concerned with the role that Keynes’s possible anti-Semitism has played in Keynesian scholarship and how the community of Keynes scholars has treated that allegation.
Dosage-sensitive functions in embryonic development drove the survival of genes on sex-specific chromosomes in snakes, birds, and mammals

Different ancestral autosomes independently evolved into sex chromosomes in snakes, birds, and mammals. In snakes and birds, females are ZW and males are ZZ; in mammals, females are XX and males are XY. Although X and Z Chromosomes retain nearly all ancestral genes, sex-specific W and Y Chromosomes suffered extensive genetic decay. In both birds and mammals, the genes that survived on sex-specific chromosomes are enriched for broadly expressed, dosage-sensitive regulators of gene expression, subject to strong purifying selection. To gain deeper insight into the processes that govern survival on sex-specific chromosomes, we carried out a meta-analysis of survival across 41 species-three snakes, 24 birds, and 14 mammals-doubling the number of ancestral genes under investigation and increasing our power to detect enrichments among survivors relative to nonsurvivors. Of 2564 ancestral genes, representing an eighth of the ancestral amniote genome, only 324 survive on present-day sex-specific chromosomes. Survivors are enriched for dosage-sensitive developmental processes, particularly development of neural crest-derived structures, such as the face. However, there was no enrichment for expression in sex-specific tissues, involvement in sex determination or gonadogenesis pathways, or conserved sex-biased expression. Broad expression and dosage sensitivity contributed independently to gene survival, suggesting that pleiotropy imposes additional constraints on the evolution of dosage compensation. We propose that maintaining the viability of the heterogametic sex drove gene survival on amniote sex-specific chromosomes, and that subtle modulation of the expression of survivor genes and their autosomal orthologs has disproportionately large effects on development and disease.
Analysis and Interventions in Large Network Games

We review classic results and recent progress on equilibrium analysis, dynamics, and optimal interventions in network games with both continuous and discrete strategy sets. We study strategic inter...
Comparative Convergences in Pleading Standards

INTRODUCTION 442 I. COMPARATIVE CIVIL PROCEDURE GENERALLY 444 A. Benefits 444 B. Obstacles 445 II. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IN FEDERAL CIVIL PLEADING 447 A. Traditional Rule 8 Pleading in the United States 447 B. Foreign Approaches 452 III. CURRENT TRENDS IN AMERICAN FEDERAL CIVIL PLEADING .... 455 A. Statutes 455 B. Twombly and Iqbal 457 IV. POTENTIAL EFFECTS OF AMERICAN FEDERAL PLEADING TRENDS 463 CONCLUSION 471
A national certification scheme to enhance trust and quality in the Indian residential solar PV market

Abstract India has recently committed to install 100 GW of solar power by 2022, the principal component of its climate policy agenda. But the pace of solar adoption in the rooftop sector has been sluggish, notwithstanding government efforts to jumpstart the market. A trusted certification scheme could turn a vicious cycle of consumer skepticism into a virtuous cycle.
Research and innovation in a networked world

The existence of a fundamental relationship between invention, innovation, and economic growth, as insisted upon by Schumpeter, is increasingly taken as an article of faith in nations around the world. Yet, the inventions-to-growth relationship is today more complex and less bounded at the scale of the nation than ever before. Just as the inventions-to-growth policy model—focusing on the development of capabilities to undertake basic science and a nurturing of entrepreneurial talent—is beginning to gain widespread acceptance, its shortcomings are becoming increasingly evident. In this paper, we describe the model and its shortcomings, focusing on implications for innovation policy of the emergence of the “globally networked enterprise.”
On f-biharmonic maps and f-biharmonic submanifolds

f-Biharmonic maps are the extrema of the f-bienergy functional. f-biharmonic submanifolds are submanifolds whose defining isometric immersions are f-biharmonic maps. In this paper, we prove that an f-biharmonic map from a compact Riemannian manifold into a non-positively curved manifold with constant f-bienergy density is a harmonic map; any f-biharmonic function on a compact manifold is constant, and that the inversions about $S^m$ for $m\ge 3$ are proper f-biharmonic conformal diffeomorphisms. We derive f-biharmonic submanifolds equations and prove that a surface in a manifold $(N^n, h)$ is an f-biharmonic surface if and only it can be biharmonically conformally immersed into $(N^n,h)$. We also give a complete classification of f-biharmonic curves in 3-dimensional Euclidean space. Many examples of proper f-biharmonic maps and f-biharmonic surfaces and curves are given.
Exchange rate implications of Border Tax Adjustment Neutrality

This paper investigates the implications for the nominal exchange rate of a Border Tax Adjustment (BTA) when there is BTA neutrality. A border tax adjustment is a change from an origin-based system of taxation, that taxes exports but exempts imports to a destination-based system that taxes imports but exempts exports. Both indirect taxes (e.g. a VAT) and direct taxes (e.g. a cash-flow corporate profit tax) can be subject to a BTA. In the US, a BTA for the corporate profit tax is under discussion. There is BTA neutrality when the real equilibrium, including measures of profitability and competitiveness, of an open economy is unchanged when it moves from an origin-based to a destination-based tax. The conventional wisdom on the exchange rate implications of a neutral BTA is that the currency of the country implementing the BTA will strengthen (appreciate) by a percentage equal to the VAT or CPT tax rate. The main insight of this note is that this 'appreciation presumption' is not robust, even when all conditions for full BTA neutrality are satisfied. Indeed, plausible alternative assumptions about constancy (or stickiness) of nominal prices support a weakening (depreciation) of the currency by the same percentage as the tax rate. On the basis on the very patchy available empirical information, it is not possible to take a view with any degree of confidence on the implications of a BTA for the nominal exchange rate, even if full BTA neutrality prevailed. Whether BTA neutrality itself is a feature of the real world is also a disputed empirical issue. Therefore, buyer (or seller) beware.
Reframing Complexity: Hedge Fund Policy Paradigm for the Way Forward

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the need for systemic risk mitigation in the shadow banking system is resoundingly evident. The task at hand is incomplete, leaving grey areas such as hedge funds obfuscated. I contend it is both timely and relevant to revisit hedge fund regulatory reform. The relationship between the banking and non-banking sectors requires continuous monitoring and further regulation, particularly in market conditions likely to shift banking functions outside the realms of prudential regulation. In addition, as complacency is a likely companion to normalcy, the window of opportunity for meaningful reforms is rapidly closing. This Article proposes an elucidating and flexible policy paradigm in support of an understandable stance on hedge fund regulation. Such approach is crucial to continue the discourse on post-crisis reforms. By conceptualizing degrees of regulatory intensity and prescriptiveness as points on a continuum, the proposed matrix of continuums provides contextual adaptability. It also reframes the complexities of hedge fund regulation using basic regulatory trade-offs. In doing so, this proposal supports ongoing evaluations and open dialogue of relevant issues. Accordingly, such policy paradigm for a targeted and balanced formula of hedge fund regulation reflects pivotal lessons from the recent crisis and offers a simplified perspective to facilitate analysis of reforms in the context of the international soft law system. * Visiting Scholar, University of Washington School of Law (2013-14). I am grateful to the University of Washington School of Law for the privilege of participating in its excellent Visiting Scholars Program and for its generous support which made this research project possible. I owe special thanks to my faculty advisor, Anita K. Krug, for her unfailing guidance and insightful comments. 2015] Reframing Complexity: Hedge Fund Policy Paradigm 479
Environmental R&D and the uncertainty of future earnings

Abstract This paper examines whether the variability in the future earnings stream generated by the investment in environmentally-related R&D projects is different than that created by the investment in other R&D projects. To carry out this investigation, I decompose total R&D expenditures into two components: those related to R&D projects aimed at reducing the firm’s costs to comply with environmental legislation (i.e., the environmental component), and those related to all other R&D projects, which are focused on increasing the firm’s revenues and/or decreasing its other operating costs (i.e., the residual component). As predicted, I find that the environmental component of R&D expenditures contributes significantly less to the variability of future earnings than the residual component.
Economic Institutions and the Durability of Democracy

Why do some democracies persist while others break down? Some studies have suggested that economic development decreases the likelihood of authoritarian reversal, which is consistent with Milton Friedman’s argument that economic freedom is necessary for political freedom. An empirical investigation of countries that have transitioned to democratic governments since World War II shows that higher quality economic institutions increase the durability of those democratic governments. This supports Friedman’s observation about the relationship between economic and political institutions.
From the ivory tower to the startup garage: : Organizational context and commercialization processes

Abstract An impressive literature documents how individual-level factors correlate with entrepreneurship and commercialization behaviors. We have far less insight, however, into how different organizational contexts may, in fact, play a dominant role in shaping these individuals and their behaviors. In this paper, I leverage a unique case of commercialization in which a largely overlapping team attempted to commercialize a technology in two different organizational contexts – first, in a university and later in a startup firm. By detailing the contextual features in each organizational environment and by linking these features to the participants’ differing approaches and attitudes toward commercialization, I extend the current literature through a demonstration of how organizational context shapes not only the initial decision to become an entrepreneur, but also the specific ways in which individuals interpret and act upon an entrepreneurial mission. More generally, I contribute to the literature on the commercialization of university research by highlighting some of the challenges inherent in adapting a context optimized for exploration to the task of exploitation.
Redistributive Preferences and the Dimensionality of Self-Determination and Luck

Surveys and experiments have uncovered a strong connection between perceptions of self-determination and preferences for redistribution. This paper presents results from a vignette-based survey that examines whether redistributive preferences are further affected by the dimensionality of luck and self-determination. The vignettes specify whether economic advantages are the result of one self-determined dimension (effort or independence), two self-determined dimensions (effort and independence), one lucky dimension (natural ability or dependence) or two lucky dimensions (natural ability and dependence). Results provide evidence that the presence of two dimensions of luck or self-determination can shift redistributive preferences relative to the presence of one dimension, but only when the decision task is cognitively simple and the vignette’s context is easily applicable to everyday life. More generally, whenever the decision task is cognitively complex or the context is ethically simplistic, the dimensionality of self-determination and luck is found to have insignificant effects on redistributive preferences. The results also demonstrate that the presence of a single, salient dimension of luck can increase support for redistribution more than the joint presence of multiple dimensions of luck.
On Forward Induction

A player's pure strategy is called relevant for an outcome of a game in extensive form with perfect recall if there exists a weakly sequential equilibrium with that outcome for which the strategy is an optimal reply at every information set it does not exclude. The outcome satisfies forward induction if it results from a weakly sequential equilibrium in which players' beliefs assign positive probability only to relevant strategies at each information set reached by a profile of relevant strategies. We prove that if there are two players and payoffs are generic, then an outcome satisfies forward induction if every game with the same reduced normal form after eliminating redundant pure strategies has a sequential equilibrium with an equivalent outcome. Thus in this case forward induction is implied by decision-theoretic criteria.
The Virtues of Knowing Less: Justifying Privacy Protections against Disclosure

This Article develops justifications for protections against the disclosure of private information. An extensive body of scholarship has attacked such protections as anathema to the Information Age, where the free flow of information is championed as a fundamental value. This Article responds to two general critiques of disclosure protections: (1) that they inhibit freedom of speech, and (2) that they restrict information useful for judging others. Regarding the free speech critique, the Article argues that not all speech is of equal value; speech of private concern is less valuable than speech of public concern. The difficulty, however, is distinguishing between public and private concerns. Traditional approaches include deferring to the media, distinguishing between public and private figures, and looking to the nature of the information disclosed. However, these approaches are flawed. Instead, we should focus on the relationships in which information is transferred and the uses to which information is put. The propriety of disclosures depends upon their purpose, not merely on the type of information disclosed. The Article analogizes to the law of evidence, in which certain information is admissible for some purposes but not others and then examines the values of free speech and argues that privacy often furthers the same ends, demonstrating that free speech should not always prevail in the balance. Next, the Article tackles the judgment and trust critique, which views personal information as essential for making judgments about whether to trust people with whom one associates. Although personal information can help facilitate judgments about other people, the Article contends that these judgments are often made quickly and out of context. In short, more information does not necessarily lead to more accurate judgments. The Article also contends that privacy protects against certain rational judgments that society may want to prohibit (such as employment decisions based on genetic information). The Article then responds to commentators who argue that gossip is valuable because it helps educate us about human nature and argues that the value of concealing one's past can, in many circumstances, outweigh the benefits of disclosure.
Between Home and Work: Assessing the Distributive Effects of Employment Law in markets of Care

This Article offers a new analytical framework for understanding the distributive role of legal regulation in the interaction of "home " and "work. " Using this framework, the Article maps the "double exceptionalism " of the family in U.S. federal employment law. It suggests that employment law treats familial care responsibilities as exceptional in two different ways: first, through family leave benefits that affect the primary labor market, labeled here "affirmative exceptionalism"; and, second, through the exclusion of inhome care workers from protective employment legislation in the secondary labor market, labeled here "negative exceptionalism. " This double exceptionalism of the family in employment law serves as a basis for an assessment of the distributive outcomes of employment law across class and gender lines. The Article shows that the combined study of affirmative and negative exceptionalism—of how employment law affects the availability of labor, as well as the working conditions, of both care workers and their employers—is crucial to a holistic understanding of the formative and distributive effects of employment law on markets of care. A central implication is that employment law should be understood as an accessible, if obdurate, legal tool which holds the potential for achieving distributional shifts from current social and political divisions of power among members of households and classes alike.
How Different are Originalism and Non-Originalism?

Several prominent and self-described “new originalists” have begun to contend that the objective original meaning of many of the Constitution’s provisions should be ascertained at a very high level of generality. They have also urged recognition of a distinction between constitutional “interpretation,” which involves the determination of the meaning of the constitutional text, and constitutional “construction,” which involves the formulation of legal rules to apply the text to concrete situations. These scholars have noted that because the constitutional text often is phrased at a very high level of generality, originalist interpretation alone simply cannot answer many difficult questions of constitutional law, and thus courts must formulate rules that are not themselves dictated by the original meaning.
The behaviour of the maximum likelihood estimator of limited dependent variable models in the presence of fixed effects

Summary The nonlinear fixed-effects model has two shortcomings, one practical and one methodological. The practical obstacle relates to the difficulty of computing the MLE of the coefficients of non-linear models with possibly thousands of dummy variable coefficients. In fact, in many models of interest to practitioners, computing the MLE of the parameters of fixed effects model is feasible even in panels with very large numbers of groups. The result, though not new, appears not to be well known. The more difficult, methodological issue is the incidental parameters problem that raises questions about the statistical properties of the ML estimator. There is relatively little empirical evidence on the behaviour of the MLE in the presence of fixed effects, and that which has been obtained has focused almost exclusively on binary choice models. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo methods to examine the small sample bias of the MLE in the tobit, truncated regression and Weibull survival models as well as the binary probit and logit and ordered probit discrete choice models. We find that the estimator in the continuous response models behaves quite differently from the familiar and oft cited results. Among our findings are: first, a widely accepted result that suggests that the probit estimator is actually relatively well behaved appears to be incorrect; second, the estimators of the slopes in the tobit model, unlike the probit and logit models that have been studied previously, appear to be largely unaffected by the incidental parameters problem, but a surprising result related to the disturbance variance estimator arises instead; third, lest one jumps to a conclusion that the finite sample bias is restricted to discrete choice models, we submit evidence on the truncated regression, which is yet unlike the tobit in that regard—it appears to be biased towards zero; fourth, we find in the Weibull model that the biases in a vector of coefficients need not be in the same direction; fifth, as apparently unexamined previously, the estimated asymptotic standard errors for the ML estimators appear uniformly to be downward biased when the model contains fixed effects. In sum, the finite sample behaviour of the fixed effects estimator is much more varied than the received literature would suggest.
Global village vs. small town: Understanding networks at the Base of the Pyramid

Abstract We compare and contrast business networks at the Base of the Pyramid (BOP) and at the Top of the Pyramid (TOP), and analyze their implications for multinational enterprises (MNEs). We first identify the specificities of BOP environments in terms of competitive environment and institutions. Building on this analysis, we develop a series of propositions regarding the impact of these specificities on the structural characteristics of BOP networks, their boundaries, the characteristics of their ties, the diversity of their partners, and their evolution over time, as compared to TOP networks. Our analysis suggests that major differences exist between both types of networks along all dimensions and that these differences have important implications for MNEs active in BOP environments.
Socialization mechanisms and goal congruence

Abstract Firms use performance measures linked to incentives and the evaluation process to motivate and direct employees' efforts towards goal congruence. In a research setting where the noise in the performance measures hinders such formal linkage, we examine how firms can achieve goal congruence. We first examine the direct relation between employees' perceptions of the extent to which socialization mechanisms (i.e., perceptions of the extent to which employees perceive that top management communicates core values, supervisors engage in career development mentoring, and employees themselves engage in peer mentoring) are related to goal congruence. Second, we examine the process by which the relationship works. We posit that the relationship works because socialization mechanisms communicate information, which reduces employees' uncertainty thus increasing their perceptions of career security, and in turn, employees become more attached to the firm and better impound its goals. Using survey data from 354 employees to estimate a structural equation model, our results fail to support a direct association between socialization mechanisms and goal congruence. However, we find an indirect association through employees' perceptions of career security. We further find that the indirect effect only holds for non-union employees. Interestingly, for union employees, goal congruence is directly facilitated by employees’ perceptions of the extent to which top managers communicate core values.
Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives

Copyright law's principal justification has for long been the theory of creator incentives. Creators are presumed to be rational utility-maximizers and therefore induced to create by the mere prospect of controlling a future market for their yet-to-be-created works. Yet, current copyright doctrine does surprisingly little to give effect to this theory. None of its current doctrines enable courts to circumscribe a creator's entitlement by reference to the idea of incentives and the limitations inherent therein. As a consequence, copyright's grant of exclusivity is presumed to extend to all markets and uses for a work, whether or not they were capable of forming any part of a creator's incentive. Through its allocation of costs and benefits, the common law too relies on providing actors with incentives to behave in certain ways. Unlike copyright law however, the common law recognizes the existence of a clear outer limit to its incentive structure and attempts to give effect to this limit through the concept of 'foreseeability'. Premised on the idea that individuals do not process consequences that are temporally or causally far removed from their actions, foreseeability requires courts to eliminate from the liability calculus certain low-probability occurrences when they are unlikely to have influenced an individual's decision at the time of action. Foreseeability thus represents a cognition-based doctrinal limit to the behavioral modification that the common law attempts to induce. This Article argues that if copyright law is to remain true to its theory of incentives, it needs to pay closer attention to the way in which incentives actually influence creative decision-making and internalize the idea that creators, like actors elsewhere, are incapable of fully anticipating all future contingencies associated with their actions, that in turn limits the effectiveness of incentives. To this end, it proposes a test of 'foreseeable copying' to limit copyright's grant of exclusivity to situations where a copier's use was reasonably foreseeable to the creator at the time of creation --the point when the incentive is meant to operate. Adopting a test of foreseeability is thus likely to better align copyright law with its underlying purpose and provide courts with a mechanism by which to give effect to copyright's theory of incentives in individual cases --thereby according it more than just rhetorical significance.
Private Litigation to Enforce Fiduciary Duties in Mutual Funds: Derivative Suits, Disinterested Directors and the Ideology of Investor Sovereignty

The recent mutual fund scandals in the United States have generated both public and private litigation, forcing renewed attention to the nature and scope of private remedies that seek compensation for fiduciary misbehavior. This paper analyzes the difficulties in pursuing such claims as derivative action, insofar as the courts have given the fund's independent directors considerable discretion to recommend the termination of such suits. It criticizes this move as a misapplication of corporate law theory generally, showing that corporate governance in mutual funds cannot be viewed through the same lens as with respect to other kinds of firms. It also argues that an ideology of consumer sovereignty displaces fiduciary responsibility with respect to many agency cost problems in the fund industry. To the extent that independent directors adopt that ideology (or are selected because they have already adopted it), they will be suboptimal shareholder representatives.
Why Do We (Still) Lack Data on Policing

The Wickersham Commission report on The Third Degree, found in the Commission’s famous Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement ended with the argument that the “real remedy” for police misconduct “lies in the will of the community,” which in turn depends on evidence about the nature and extent of police abuse. In this brief essay, I argue that the report’s call for information about policing has gone largely unanswered. Eighty years later, we still lack enough data about what the police do to shape their conduct effectively. Public policy and legal decisions about policing depend heavily on empirical judgments, but police chiefs and local government officials do not generate sufficient data about the police absent external regulation. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agencies charged with collecting information on policing, have focused on serving the law enforcement community rather than facilitating governance of the police. The consequence is that we do not have the information we need to secure effective and rights-protecting policing.
The European Monetary Union as a commitment device for new EU member states

We show that the credibility gain from permanently committing to a fixed exchange rate by joining the European Monetary Union can outweigh the loss from giving up independent monetary policy if the domestic monetary authority does not enjoy full credibility. Using a DSGE model, this paper shows that when the central bank enjoys only limited credibility a pegged exchange rate regime yields a lower loss compared to an inflation targeting policy, even if this policy ranking would be reversed in a full-credibility environment. There exists an initial stock of credibility that must be achieved for a policy-maker to adopt inflation targeting over a strict exchange rate targeting regime. Full credibility is not a precondition, but exposure to foreign and financial shocks and high steady state inflation make joining the EMU relatively more attractive for a given level of credibility. The theoretical results are consistent with empirical evidence we provide on the relationship between credibility and monetary regimes using a Bank of England survey of 81 central banks.
Let's get personal: An international examination of the influence of communication, culture and social distance on other regarding preferences

Abstract This paper identifies when other-regarding preferences (ORPs) such as trust, reciprocity and altruism will likely arise. We experimentally examine the influence of social distance and communication on ORPs in four countries. We demonstrate that country of origin significantly influences ORPs, but also find mixed support for the relationship between ORPs and social distance; increasing social distance has the expected negative effect in the individually oriented U.S., but its effects internationally are different. This interaction is explained by an individual's cultural orientation. Finally, we show strong evidence that personal but irrelevant communication significantly increases ORPs.
Online labor markets

In recent years, a number of online labor markets have emerged that allow workers from around the world to sell their labor to an equally global pool of buyers. The creators of these markets play the role of labor market intermediary by providing institutional support and remedying informational asymmetries. In this paper, I explore market creators' choices of price structure, price level and investment in platforms. I also discuss competition among markets and the business strategies employed by market creators. The paper concludes with a discussion of the productivity and welfare effects of online labor.
Torture, Necessity, and Supreme Emergency: Law and Morality at the End of Law

This paper employs Michael Walzer's concept of "Supreme Emergency" to address the permissibility of torture under conditions of necessity. It proposes moving beyond both utilitarian and deontological approaches to legal authority in order to understood necessity as a moral category. A full account of right action under conditions of necessity therefore demands taking account of the distinct yet cooperative function provided by legal and moral norms. A political official might therefore possess moral but not legal warrant to act in contravention of binding legal norms. Preserving the validity of law is essential to the economy of social reconstitution in the aftermath of political tragedy.
Information Acquisition and Under-Diversification

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the investor holds depend on the information he observes. We build a framework to solve jointly for investment and information choices, with general preferences and information cost functions. Although the optimal research strategies depend on preferences and costs, the main result is that the investor who can first collect information systematically deviates from holding a diversified portfolio. Information acquisition can rationalize investing in a diversified fund and a concentrated set of assets, an allocation often observed, but usually deemed anomalous. Copyright , Wiley-Blackwell.
Torts and Choice of Law: Searching for Principles

If a tortious act (e.g., negligently firing a rifle) occurs in state X and the harm (e.g., killing a bystander) occurs in state Y, which state’s law should apply? This is a simple example of the “choice of law” problem in torts. The problem arises between states or provinces with different laws within one nation and between different nations. In this comment, prepared for the 2006 American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting, I examine this problem largely in terms of incentive effects, and briefly consider how the analysis could be incorporated into the standard introductory course on tort law. I conclude that a zone of foreseeable impact rule provides the best underlying principle in conflict of law situations. This rule supports the traditional legal approach (lex loci) to conflicts of laws and helps to explain modern approaches as well. ∗ Professor of Law, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, knhylton@bu.edu.
What do you expect? Imperfect policy credibility and tests of the expectations hypothesis ☆

Abstract The expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates describes a conventional view of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy where bond rates reflect current and expected movements in the policy-controlled rate. However, empirical rejections of the expectations hypothesis are commonplace and lead many to question this description of policy transmission. This paper argues that failure to account for imperfect policy credibility may explain empirical rejections. Empirical rejections may occur even when changing anticipations of future short rates are the primary source of variation in bond rates and the standard term structure transmission channel remains valid.
The Offshoring Return Premium

We use 10-K filings to construct novel text-based measures of the extent to which U.S. firms are exposed to three offshore activities: the sale of output, purchase of input, and ownership of produc...
From low-quality reporting to financial crises: Politics of disclosure regulation along the economic cycle

Abstract This paper examines how financial reporting regulations affect, and respond to, macroeconomic cycles by exploring a positive framework in which regulators subject to political pressures respond to cyclical demands by borrowers and lenders. We establish that, as economic conditions initially decline, political power shifts toward interest groups favoring less financial transparency. What follows is a counter-cyclical increase in economic activity, as more non-reporting loans are financed, possibly coincidental with more aggregate uncertainty. During a recession, reporting quality is increased, potentially causing a crisis-like adjustment of economic activity to the cycle. We also discuss implications for event studies, bank lobbying, mark-to-market and cost of capital.
The Embedded Actor and the Invention of Natural Economic Law: Policy Change and Railroader Response in Early America

Economic sociologists stress that economic actors are embedded in a sociohistorical context that shapes and constrains activity. Neoinstitutionalists build on this idea and argue that economic actors are embedded in two key ways. First, they are embedded in the rationalized worldview described by Weber in which every end has an optimal means. Second, economic actors are embedded in a local context in which they collectively search for optimal strategies. Whereas local contexts and strategies vary greatly, neoinstitutionalists find great regularity in the script by which economic actors converge in strategies. The present article expounds on this “double embeddedness” by way of a single historical case: the construction of strategy by early American railroaders.
Uncertainty or Misvaluation? New Evidence on Determinants of Merger Activity from the Banking Industry

We use data from the past 30 years of takeover activity in the U.S. banking industry to test competing neoclassical and misvaluation merger theories. Test results are consistent with evidence in the literature that merger activity is significantly related to both structural industry change and stock price misvaluation. Our primary contribution is to show that changes in misvaluation reflect a rise in industry-wide risk taking and that increases in risk originate from changes in industry structure due to deregulation. A measure of bank risk taking subsumes the power of stock price misvaluation to explain subsequent merger activity.
Time Evolution in Macroscopic Systems. I. Equations of Motion

Time evolution of macroscopic systems is re-examined primarily through further analysis and extension of the equation of motion for the density matrix ρ(t). Because ρ contains both classical and quantum-mechanical probabilities it is necessary to account for changes in both in the presence of external influences, yet standard treatments tend to neglect the former. A model of time-dependent classical probabilities is presented to illustrate the required type of extension to the conventional time-evolution equation, and it is shown that such an extension is already contained in the definition of the density matrix.
A Note on Monitoring Costs and Voter Fraud

Election fraud can threaten democracy if many ineligible people are allowed to vote. The usual policy prescription is to increase monitoring cost. However, this is very costly. This paper proposes a more cost effective strategy: substitute tougher and consistent statutes across states against voter fraud.
Collective spin dynamics under dissipative spin Hall torque

Current-induced spin torques in layered magnetic heterostructures have many commonalities across broad classes of magnetic materials. These include not only collinear ferromagnets, ferrimagnets, and antiferromagnets but also more complex noncollinear spin systems. We develop a general Lagrangian–Rayleigh approach for studying the role of dissipative torques, which can pump energy into long-wavelength magnetic dynamics, causing dynamic instabilities. While the Rayleigh structure of such torques is similar for different magnetic materials, their consequences depend sensitively on the nature of the order and, in particular, on whether there is a net magnetic moment. The latter endows the system with a unipolar switching capability, while magnetically compensated materials tend to evolve toward limit cycles, at large torques, with chirality dependent on the torque sign. Apart from the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases, we discuss ferrimagnets, which display an intricate competition between switching and limit cycles. As a simple case for compensated noncollinear order, we consider isotropic spin glasses and a scenario of their coexistence with a collinear magnetic order.