cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Free Exercise and Substantial Burdens under Federal Law

As currently interpreted, the First Amendment does not provide much protection against neutral and generally applicable laws that incidentally impose significant burdens on religious practices. RFRA and RLUIPA provide more protection against the federal government’s imposing burdens on religious practice, but the circuits have adopted different and conflicting tests to determine which burdens are sufficiently substantial to trigger the relevant protections. This article discusses some of the differing interpretations of the constitutional and statutory tests, explaining the need for a clear standard that might be applied consistently across the circuits.
Reexamining the managerial ownership effect on firm value

Abstract Whether equity-based compensation and equity ownership align the interests of managers with stockholders is an important question in finance. Early studies found an inverted U-shaped relation between managerial ownership and firm value, but later studies using firm fixed effects found no relation. Managerial ownership levels change very slowly over time which may mask an ownership effect on firm value when using a fixed effect model. This is due to a much smaller within firm variation than between firm variation. We demonstrate that using pay-performance semi-elasticity, rather than pay-performance sensitivity as a measure of managerial ownership incentives, results in meaningful variation within firm over time. The greater within firm variation increases the power to detect a relation between managerial ownership and firm value with fixed effect regressions. As in the early research on this issue, we find a significant inverted U-shaped relation between managerial ownership and Tobin's Q in fixed effects regressions and after controlling for endogeneity with both two-stage and three-stage least squares regressions. Our results are consistent with incentive alignment at low levels and risk aversion at high levels of managerial ownership.
Hurdle Rates for Overseas Projects

Estimating risk-adjusted hurdle rates for overseas projects (or divisions or subsidiaries) is generally more difficult than for domestic ones. One difficulty can be the adjustment for political risk in emerging market countries. Other difficulties arise when adjusting foreign proxy firm risk measures for debt in foreign currencies and for differences in operational hedging policies. In addition, currency differences can create issues. To estimate a foreign project's local currency cost of capital that is consistent with the project's cost of capital from the home currency perspective, the project's systematic risk in the different currencies must be measured relative to the same market index, like a global index. And the conversion of the risk and return model across currencies can be trickier than it looks. Keywords: overseas division; cost of capital; operating beta; global CAPM; pure play proxy method; accounting beta method; country beta method; developed markets; emerging markets; sovereign risk; political risk; unlevering; FX beta; uncovered interest rate parity; FX exposure
Risk control of mean-reversion time in statistical arbitrage

This paper deals with the risk of mean-reversions in statistical arbitrage. The basic concept of statistical arbitrage is to exploit short-term deviations in returns from a long-term equilibrium across several assets. This kind of strategy heavily relies on the assumption of mean-reversion of idiosyncratic returns - reverting to a long-term mean after a certain amount of time, but literature on the assessment of risk on this belief is rare. In this paper, we propose a simple scheme that controls the risk on mean-reversions, via portfolio selections and screenings. Realizing that each residual exhibits different mean-reversion time, the residuals that have fast mean-reverting speed are selected to form portfolios. In addition, further control is imposed by allowing the trading activity only when the goodness-of-fit of the estimation for trading signals is sufficiently high. Furthermore, we design the dynamic asset allocation with the market- and dollar-neutrality conditions as a constrained optimization problem, which can be solved numerically. The improved reliability and robustness of the strategy from our method is demonstrated through back-testing results. It has been found that the performance of this investment framework is robust to market fluctuations. We further provide an answer to a puzzled relation among the number of factors, lengths of estimation window, and transaction costs, which are crucial parameters that have direct impacts on the strategy.
Integration without institutions: the NAFTA mutation of the EC model and the future of the GATT regime

Integration may be viewed as an evolutionary outgrowth of heightened social and economic interdependence brought about by advances in technology. As persons, goods, capital, services and ideas cross artificial national frontiers at increased rates of speed, the wisdom of imposing disparate governmental regulatory measures is not only called into question because of a variety of factors relating to efficiencies and economies of scale, but the authority of competing national power structures to regulate these flows is called upon for examination.The NAFTA itself is, like the EC, an experiment. It will provide a model for other nations which are interested in reducing trade barriers, but not in creating significant central institutions or in harmonizing laws and regulations. The EC model is a comparative success. In addressing problems confronted by the new NAFTA,solutions may be found by examining the EC experience. Of course, the EC model itself is imperfect and is continually being refined. Perhaps the NAFTA will benefit by observation of the EC as it works its way through the obstacles on the path to completed integration.Though the ambition of the NAFTA regarding the creation of regional institutions is rather modest, and the arrangement is lacking in mechanisms for the harmonization of law, the planting of the acorn of regional institutions in the NAFTA may prove to be a worthwhile task, in the hope of its long term growth into a solid oak of institutions capable of creating a complete and effective NAFTA regional arrangement.
Abusive: Dodd-Frank Section 1031 and the Continuing Struggle To Protect Consumers

id=843826. 150 See supra note 138 and accompanying text. a 319 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2003). 152 Id. at 1133-34 (alteration in original) (internal quotation marks omitted). AT&T's market research indicated that only twenty-five percent of customers would open the notice if it was sent as a separate mailing, ten percent would not even look at it, and only thirty percent would read the entire contract. Id. at 1134. 1135 ST. JOHN'S LAW REVIEW The practice has analogues in credit card agreements. In addition to its standard contract, Bank of America provides an additional sheet labeled "Important Summary of Changes to Your Account." 5 3 Consumers who read the summary but not the agreement would miss a default provision that lets Bank of America impose a penalty APR that is ten percent higher than the standard APR.154 While the Ninth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals struck down the worrisome contracts in Ting on unconscionability grounds, the CFPB could likely address a range of similar practices under Section 1031, rather than strike at the application of an individual contract, as unconscionability requires. * Conducting market research to dissuade consumers from reading contracts likely implicates at least two bases for finding a practice abusive under Section 1031. First, both AT&T's market research and Bank of America's practice of sneaking material information into a separate notice likely implicate Section 1031(d)(1)'s ban on materially interfering with a consumer's ability to understand the terms or conditions attached to a service. The market research employed in Ting was used specifically to interfere with a consumer's understanding of the conditions associated with AT&T's service. Similarly, by needlessly making important disclosures difficult to find, Bank of America interfered with consumers' ability to process the universe of information needed to responsibly use their credit cards. Because both companies knew that consumers would be less likely to read material information, rendering their disclosures ineffective, the CFPB could likely declare the practice abusive. Second, it is difficult to imagine a practice more thoroughly tailored to Section 1031(d)(2)(A)'s prohibition on taking unreasonable advantage of a consumer's lack of understanding of the material risks or costs of a service. By choosing a method of communicating for the express purpose of denying consumers the information they need to responsibly use a service, both companies took unreasonable advantage of their customers' 153 See Ronald J. Mann, "Contracting" for Credit, 104 MICH. L. REV. 899, 908 (2006) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Trust-Based Multi-Robot Symbolic Motion Planning with a Human-in-the-Loop

Symbolic motion planning for robots is the process of specifying and planning robot tasks in a discrete space, then carrying them out in a continuous space in a manner that preserves the discrete-level task specifications. Despite progress in symbolic motion planning, many challenges remain, including addressing scalability for multi-robot systems and improving solutions by incorporating human intelligence. In this article, distributed symbolic motion planning for multi-robot systems is developed to address scalability. More specifically, compositional reasoning approaches are developed to decompose the global planning problem, and atomic propositions for observation, communication, and control are proposed to address inter-robot collision avoidance. To improve solution quality and adaptability, a hypothetical dynamic, quantitative, and probabilistic human-to-robot trust model is developed to aid this decomposition. Furthermore, a trust-based real-time switching framework is proposed to switch between autonomous and manual motion planning for tradeoffs between task safety and efficiency. Deadlock- and livelock-free algorithms are designed to guarantee reachability of goals with a human-in-the-loop. A set of nontrivial multi-robot simulations with direct human inputs and trust evaluation is provided, demonstrating the successful implementation of the trust-based multi-robot symbolic motion planning methods.
Differentiation of planetesimals and the thermal consequences of melt migration

Abstract– We model the heating of a primordial planetesimal by decay of the short-lived radionuclides 26Al and 60Fe to determine (1) the time scale on which melting will occur, (2) the minimum size of a body that will produce silicate melt and differentiate, (3) the migration rate of molten material within the interior, and (4) the thermal consequences of the transport of 26Al in partial melt. Our models incorporate results from previous studies of planetary differentiation and are constrained by petrologic (i.e., grain-size distributions), isotopic (e.g., 207Pb-206Pb and 182Hf-182W ages), and mineralogical properties of differentiated achondrites. We show that formation of a basaltic crust via melt percolation was limited by the formation time of the body, matrix grain size, and viscosity of the melt. We show that low viscosity ( 100 km in size. Differentiation would be most likely for planetesimals larger than 20 km in diameter that accreted within approximately 2.7 Myr of CAI formation.
Growth and the Effects of Inflation

Abstract In this paper, we study the relationship between the rate of increase of the money supply and the rate of growth of output in an economy. We show that in some models of endogenous growth, inflation has direct effects on the growth rate of the economy. Despite this, the estimated welfare cost of inflation from calibrated examples is similar to that found in exogenous growth models.
Exchange Rate Targeting in the Presence of Foreign Debt Obligations

Abstract We study the impact of foreign debt on the optimal degree of trade-off between the three open economy objectives of the central bank—the desire to smooth exchange rate fluctuations to promote consumption risk sharing, the need for exchange rate flexibility to facilitate expenditure-switching in the face of sticky prices, and the incentive to tilt international prices so as to lower the labor effort of domestic households (terms-of-trade externality)—in a two-country productivity-shock-driven DSGE model with incomplete asset markets and deviations from purchasing power parity. We find that high levels of net foreign debt call for a policy with a significant degree of exchange rate management, which can constrain the extent of otherwise inefficient cross-border wealth transfers that arise due to debt valuation and risk premium effects. In particular, the central bank can improve consumer welfare by up to 0.1% of steady state consumption by responding to exchange rate fluctuations when domestic debt-to-GDP ratio reaches 100%. We also find that the ranking of optimal policy rules depends on the elasticity of import-export substitution. When home and foreign goods are complements, the responsiveness of the real exchange to shocks is muted, in turn mitigating the excessive cross-country wealth transfer associated with the debt valuation effect. In this case, CPI targeting outperforms the nominal peg at high levels of debt by improving international risk sharing.
Class certification in the Microsoft indirect purchaser litigation

The indirect purchaser cases brought against Microsoft under state law in the wake of the government's victory in United States v. Microsoft have been certified as class actions much more frequently than other indirect purchaser cases. In this study, I explore possible explanations for this disparity, including lenient standards of certification; factual characteristics of the Microsoft cases that might be favorable to certification; and the supposed preclusive effect of findings in the government case. In the conclusion, I consider whether the certification of these cases under lenient standards has been in the public interest.
ACCESS TO JUSTICE AND ABUSES OF CONTRACT

Mass-market standardized fine print (boilerplate) altering the rights of consumers is greatly expanding in today’s digital environment Mass-market boilerplate impacts access to justice when it deletes rights to redress of grievances. Such deletion of rights leads to normative degradation because it undermines agreement, which is the basis of justifiable contractual enforcement, and leads to democratic degradation because it undermines the basis of civil society and the rule of law. A brief comparison of US and Canadian common law suggests that Canada’s legal system is less willing to allow these inroads into access to justice. Dans le monde numerique d’aujourd’hui, l’insertion dans les conventions, ententes et contrats les plus communs de clauses standardisees en petits caracteres, qui denaturent les droits des consommateurs, est de plus en plus frequente. Ces clauses passe-partout ont des repercussions sur l’acces a la justice lorsqu’elles suppriment le droit a la reparation d’un prejudice. Une telle suppression de droits mene a la degradation normative parce qu’elle mine le consentement, qui est la base de l’execution justifiable d’une obligation contractuelle, et a la degradation de la democratie parce qu’elle gruge la base de la societe civile et la primaute du droit. Une breve comparaison de la common law des Etats-Unis et de celle du Canada laisse voir que le systeme juridique canadien est moins porte a permettre de tels empietements sur l’acces a la justice.
Dynamic branching and interest rate competition of commercial banks: Evidence from Hungary

Abstract I supplement previous models of bank competition by incorporating the endogenous branching choices of commercial banks. I apply a dynamic structural model of banks' branching and interest rate choices to a unique bank-level dataset on Hungarian commercial banks during 2004–2007. I find that banks charge a premium in interest rates for relative branch network dominance, and banks with relatively smaller networks are less likely to close branches. I present significant and robust estimates of branch setup costs and scrap values, and discuss the potential use of branching restrictions as regulatory tools to alter lending rates and consumer surplus.
The ADEA and Sports Law

The purpose of this article is to provide insight into age issues in sports law and its relationship to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), a federal law. There are a few published decisions involving the ADEA in the sports setting. However, there are some cases involving claims by coaches, support staff and administrators who allege they were terminated unlawfully based upon age discrimination. Part I presents a comprehensive overview of the ADEA including defenses to a claim of age discrimination. Part II offers relevant cases with regard to the ADEA and its evolution including the few cases that are specifically applicable in the sport environment. Part III addresses considerations for the future of the relationship between the ADEA and the sports industry.
Who Boycotts Whom? Marginalization, Company Knowledge, and Strategic Issues:

The authors apply marginalization theory to develop a model of boycotts that incorporates both individual motives and corporate strategic issues. Overall, their analysis of more than 25,000 individ...
The Hidden Life of Consumer Bankruptcy Reform: Danger Signs for the New U.S. Law from Unexpected Parallels in the Netherlands

This Article takes advantage of a rare double opportunity to break new ground in commercial, consumer, and comparative law. First, it offers one of the first detailed analyses of key elements of the new U.S. consumer bankruptcy reform law, which will go into effect on October 17, 2005. Second, this Article offers a unique perspective on the new law in light of a curious and surprising discovery: It turns out that the U.S. consumer bankruptcy system as reformed will resemble in many critical respects the consumer bankruptcy system in place for the past six years in the Netherlands. As a result of this serendipitous U.S.-Dutch convergence, years of experience under the Dutch consumer debt relief system can serve as a sort of crystal ball, providing a rare glimpse into the future of the new U.S. system. This Article describes both the law in books as well as the law in action as it has developed in the Netherlands in recent years. The Dutch law on the ground has diverged in significant ways from legislative expectations, and such divergences might well be repeated - for better or worse - in the United States in coming years. In particular, several key similarities and distinctions between the Dutch and U.S. systems reveal latent weaknesses and portend an impending breakdown in the credit counseling and means testing parts of our new system. A comparative view of recent Dutch developments offers not only cause for concern for coming problems, however, but also hope for some effective solutions.
The Role of U.S. Market on International Risk‐Return Tradeoff Relations

We study the intertemporal risk-return tradeoff relations based on returns from 18 international markets. We find striking new empirical evidence that the inclusion of U.S. market returns significantly changes the estimated risk-return tradeoff relations in international markets from mostly negative to predominantly positive. Our results are consistent with the lead-lag effect between U.S. and international markets in the sense of Rapach, Strauss and Zhou.
The Third Wave: The Alien Tort Statute and the War on Terrorism

The Supreme Court's decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain to keep the door ajar for lawsuits alleging violations of international law under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) has important implications for the U.S. government's prosecution of the war on terrorism. Unlike "first wave" ATS lawsuits against other aliens, or "second wave" ATS lawsuits against multinational corporations, what I call the "third wave" of ATS lawsuits are directed at the U.S. government itself. This third wave has already manifested itself in ATS lawsuits arising out of U.S. mistreatment of prisoners held in Iraq, alleged mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the rendition of suspected terrorists to third countries. My goal in this symposium essay is neither to celebrate nor to condemn this coming wave of ATS litigation. Rather, my more modest task is to describe examples of these new ATS lawsuits, explain why the Sosa decision will not prevent such lawsuits, and to suggest how these lawsuits will highlight the role of the executive branch in the administration of international law by U.S. courts. As a doctrinal matter, the executive branch has a crucial, yet unexplored, role to play in the application of international law by domestic courts. The third wave ATS lawsuits will test the importance of this role.
Matters of Public Safety and the Current Quarrel over the Scope of the Quarles Exception to Miranda

In October 1984, the Burger Court set forth an exception to the Miranda doctrine in New York v. Quarles permitting officers to intentionally abstain from administering Miranda warnings to suspects where a threat to the safety of the public or officers exists. However, latent ambiguity arising from the Quarles decision authored by Justice William Rehnquist has resulted in a split among the federal courts of appeals as to what constitutes a “public safety threat.” Some courts broadly extend the Quarles exception to inherently dangerous situations, including the threat of an officer mishandling an undiscovered weapon. Other courts narrowly apply Quarles to exigent circumstances where there is actual evidence that a suspect or other third party could inflict immediate harm to officers or the public. As the only exception permitting an intentional violation of Miranda, this circuit split concerning the scope of the Quarles exception poses a substantial threat to the ongoing role of Miranda in the criminal justice system. In light of this conflict and the possible repercussions, this Note endorses the narrow approach as the most consistent with the language and intent of Quarles. It further proposes a formal, three-prong test for applying the Quarles exception that requires officers to have actual knowledge of an immediate threat, with all pre-Miranda questioning of a suspect objectively evaluated to ensure that it is narrowly tailored to that threat. Finally, this Note concludes that the proposed three-prong test is the best method to ensure uniformity in the application of Quarles and to prevent the exception from threatening the integrity of the Miranda doctrine.
Corruption culture and corporate misconduct

Abstract Despite significant interest in corporate culture, there is little empirical research on its role in influencing corporate misconduct. Using cultural background information on key company insiders, I construct a measure of corporate corruption culture, capturing a firm's general attitude toward opportunistic behavior. Firms with high corruption culture are more likely to engage in earnings management, accounting fraud, option backdating, and opportunistic insider trading. I further explore the inner workings of corruption culture and find evidence that it operates both as a selection mechanism and by having a direct influence on individual behavior.
Reg Neg Redux: The Career of a Procedural Reform

This Article traces the trajectory of negotiated rulemaking within American administrative law. The popularity of negotiated rulemaking — among scholars, politicians, and regulators — has waxed and waned since its start in the 1980s. This Article describes and assesses these shifts, charting the birth of negotiated rulemaking, its incorporation into the APA, and its infrequent use in recent years. In mapping the rise and fall of negotiated rulemaking, we focus on two particular critiques — that it violates normative commitments to expertise and rationality in bureaucratic decision making, and that it fails to deliver on its promises of faster rulemaking and less litigation. This Article contends that the first critique is overblown and that the second is true in some instances but not in others. We argue that negotiated rulemaking is most valuable when the appropriate negotiating parties can be easily identified, when they are likely to make concessions and build rapport with each other, and when traditional methods of rulemaking have become ossified.
Commuting and Taxes: Theory, Empirics and Welfare Implications

We examine the effect of interstate differences in income taxes on commuting times. Our theoretical model introduces a border into a model of an urban area and shows that differences in average tax rates distort commuting patterns, but the sign of the effect depends on whether taxes are residence-based or employment-based. Empirically, tax differentials have a large effect on commuting times for affluent households and mobile households. We show that commuting times are a sufficient statistic to measure the spatial welfare effects of tax policy. The model and empirical design can be used by economists to study other policy differences. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Political centralization in pre-colonial Africa

Abstract In this paper we investigate the empirical correlates of political centralization using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We specifically investigate the explanatory power of the standard models of Eurasian state formation which emphasize the importance of high population density, inter-state warfare and trade as factors leading to political centralization. We find that while in the whole world sample these factors are indeed positively correlated with political centralization, this is not so in the African sub-sample. Indeed, none of the variables are statistically related to political centralization. We also provide evidence that political centralization, where it took place, was indeed associated with better public goods and development outcomes. We conclude that the evidence is quite consistent with the intellectual tradition initiated in social anthropology by Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in the 1940s which denied the utility of Eurasian models in explaining patterns of political centralization in Africa.
The “Hot Hand” Myth in Professional Basketball

The “hot hand” describes the belief that the performance of an athlete, typically a basketball player, temporarily improves following a string of successes. Although some earlier research failed to detect a hot hand, these studies are often criticized for using inappropriate settings and measures. The present study was designed with these criticisms in mind. It offers new evidence in a unique setting, the NBA Long Distance Shootout contest, using various measures. Traditional sequential dependency runs analyses, individual level analyses, and an analysis of spontaneous outbursts by contest announcers about players who are “on fire” fail to reveal evidence of a hot hand. We conclude that declarations of hotness in basketball are best viewed as historical commentary rather than as prophecy about future performance.
Rhetoric and Reality in the Tax Law of Charity

The rhetoric of public purposes in charity law has created the mistaken impression that charity is public and fulfills public goals, when the reality is that charity is private and cannot be expected to solve the problems that governments can solve. The rhetoric arises from a combination of charitylaw history and tax expenditure analysis. The reality follows the money and control of charitable organizations. Due to this mismatch, the tax law of charity endorses an entitlement to pre-tax income and a bias against taxation. Without the rhetoric, it would be clear that government wholly is responsible for public goods and distribution. Without the rhetoric, charities would be transparently private. Public and private institutions should have distinct roles that derive from the identification of government responsibilities in a just society. Only government is in a position to guarantee equality and freedom, and the law should not create expectations that private charity will fulfill crucial public obligations. If government guarantees all the rights of citizenship, private organizations can focus on functions that government cannot serve. Charities have an important role in our heterogeneous society connected to fostering pluralism and diversity. They should not relieve the government of its more fundamental role in ensuring just institutions. On account of the rhetoric, tax benefits for charity have been subjected to too high a burden of justification. Private organizations that serve the public functions of challenging government, guaranteeing pluralism, and safeguarding private values deserve the benefits that charities currently receive under the law. This Article contrasts the rhetoric of public benefit connected to charity in the law with the reality of private control of charitable organizations.1 It argues that the tension between the rhetoric and reality have produced norms of entitlement that undermine taxation.2 It offers an approach to the
Remedying Disregard in Global Regulatory Governance: Accountability, Participation, and Responsiveness +

A myriad of specialized and fragmented global regulatory bodies wield ever-increasing power and influence. In making decisions, these mission-oriented authorities tend systematically, due to deep-seated structural factors, to give greater regard to the interests and concerns of some actors, especially powerful states and well-organized economic actors, and lesser regard to the often peripheral interests and concerns of more weakly organized and less powerful groups and of vulnerable individuals. The overall pattern of global regulation reflects a similar bias. The most powerful global regulatory regimes promote the objectives of dominant states and economic actors, whereas regimes to protect weaker groups and individuals are often less effective or virtually nonexistent and are thus unable to protect their interests and concerns. As a result of these two types of disregard, the dominant actors in global regulatory governance enjoy disproportionate benefits from international cooperation, while weaker groups and individuals suffer deprivation and often serious harm.
Voter Ignorance and Judicial Elections

Despite their initial promise and democratic pedigree, judicial elections in the United States have been described as an “unmitigated failure” and a “hopeless disaster.” Even the most ardent defenders of judicial elections acknowledge their capacity to undermine judicial independence and impartiality. But the elections’ potential to promote judicial accountability has also remained unfulfilled. Although scholars have offered different theories and explanations for these shortcomings, and have advanced a panoply of solutions, the results so far have been underwhelming. One after another, scholars and judges have called for judicial elections to be abandoned.This article argues that voter ignorance is at the root of the problem. The public’s political ignorance is widespread, and that is particularly true when it comes to electing judges. Neither judicial independence nor judicial accountability can exist when a judge’s job is in the hands of an uninformed electorate. Instead, voter ignorance breeds judicial fear, which in turn leads to less independent, less impartial, and even less accountable judges.The article proposes ballot notations as a novel solution to the voter ignorance problem. Specifically, states should include on their ballots an evaluation of judges by a non-partisan judicial performance evaluation commission, made up of lawyers, litigants, academics, judges, and public (lay) members. This would be a substantial change in practices. Very few ballot notations are used in modern elections generally, and judicial elections in particular. The ones that are used, candidates’ party affiliation and incumbency status, have proven to be ineffective in the context of judicial elections. This proposal also is novel in theory. Scholars have ignored the judicial-election ballot itself as holding a potential solution to the voter ignorance problem. But ballot notations can alleviate the voter ignorance problem and, at least partly, negate judicial fear. These notations, therefore, may restore the original vision of judicial elections, allowing voters to hold judges accountable while also preserving judicial independence.
The Constitutional Relevance of the Employer-Sovereign Relationship: Examining the Due Process Rights of Government Employees in Light of the Public Employee Speech Doctrine

Examining the Due Process Rights of Government Employees in Light of the Public Employee Speech Doctrine examines the case law and rationale underlying the rule that public employment qualifies as property under the Due Process clause. Traditionally, the kind of property entitled to due process protections did not include the expectation of continued government employment. But during the rights explosion of the 1960s, the court extended due process protections to a wide range of government benefits and programs, including public employment. This extension, however, departed from the historic grounding of constitutional rights in the citizen-sovereign relationship, with, due process rights now conferred upon individuals not as citizens but as public employees. An analogous situation exists in connection with the First Amendment rights of public employees. The doctrines articulated in this area have continued to incorporate the government-as-sovereign versus government-as-employer distinction. Indeed, the Supreme Court has recently imposed an even more rigid citizen-employee distinction on the type of public employee speech receiving constitutional protection. According to this newly articulated doctrine, the citizen-employee test is a determinative of whether the individual is to enjoy First Amendment rights. If an individual speaks as a citizen, he or she enjoys full constitutional protection; but if that individual speaks as an employee, he or she only receives the protections flowing from the employment relationship. The Article argues that this same approach should be taken with respect to the due process property rights of public employees. For instance, if an individual acquires an expectation of future employment only because of his or her status as a government employee and not as a citizen, then no constitutional due process rights should arise.
Undistillable: Making A Nasty Teacher That CANNOT teach students

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely used technique to transfer knowledge from pre-trained teacher models to (usually more lightweight) student models. However, in certain situations, this technique is more of a curse than a blessing. For instance, KD poses a potential risk of exposing intellectual properties (IPs): even if a trained machine learning model is released in ``black boxes'' (e.g., as executable software or APIs without open-sourcing code), it can still be replicated by KD through imitating input-output behaviors. To prevent this unwanted effect of KD, this paper introduces and investigates a concept called Nasty Teacher: a specially trained teacher network that yields nearly the same performance as a normal one, but would significantly degrade the performance of student models learned by imitating it. We propose a simple yet effective algorithm to build the nasty teacher, called self-undermining knowledge distillation. Specifically, we aim to maximize the difference between the output of the nasty teacher and a normal pre-trained network. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method is effective on both standard KD and data-free KD, providing the desirable KD-immunity to model owners for the first time. We hope our preliminary study can draw more awareness and interest in this new practical problem of both social and legal importance.
Measurement sequences for magic state distillation

Magic state distillation uses special codes to suppress errors in input states, which are often tailored to a Clifford-twirled error model. We present detailed measurement sequences for magic state distillation protocols which can suppress arbitrary errors on any part of a protocol, assuming the independence of errors across qubits. Provided with input magic states, our protocol operates on a two-dimensional square grid by measurements of ZZ on horizontal pairs of qubits, XX on vertical pairs, and Z,X on single qubits.
Unmanifested Harm in Business-to-Consumer Transactions

Consumer products sometimes display the quality of unmanifested harm: they have not yet failed or caused harm, but they have a statistical probability of failing prior to the expiration of their expected useful life or of causing harm to exposed persons. In this situation, should consumers be entitled to an immediate remedy, or should they be required to wait until the harm becomes manifest? This article considers four liability regimes for unmanifested harm: (a) delayed damages that require the consumer to wait until the harm occurs; (b) anticipatory damages that award money to a consumer based on the statistical probability that the product will fail or cause harm; (c) injunctive relief prohibiting the manufacturer from producing the product; and (d) trust damages, under which the manufacturer endows a bankruptcy-remote fund for the purpose of compensating consumers if and when harm occurs. It turns out that any of these remedies can be efficient, and that the efficiency implications of the different remedies depend on the facts and circumstances of a given situation.
Testing the “Inverted-U” Phenomenon in Moral Development on Recently Promoted Senior Managers and Partners*

This paper examines the change in the average level of moral development over a 7.5-year period of promotion, attrition, and survival in five Big 6 firms. The study improves upon previous cross-sectional studies that found decreases in the average level of moral development at the senior manager and partner levels, which has been referred to as the “inverted-U” phenomenon. Problems with these studies that limit the generalizability of their findings include their cross-sectional nature and samples that usually come from one or two firms. Over a 7.5-year period, we found that the participating Big 6 firms retained auditors with higher average levels of moral development (measured using the defining issues test), while those with lower average levels left the firms. The average level of moral development for new partners was at least as high as the group from which they came. This research suggests that the concern about Big 6 firms retaining a higher proportion of auditors with lower moral development may be an artifact of research design.
Auditors' Internal Control over Financial Reporting Decisions: Analysis, Synthesis, and Research Directions

SUMMARY: We synthesize the literature on auditors' evaluation of, and reporting on, internal control over financial reporting (ICOFR), as required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The purpose of the synt...
Risk Based Student Loans

Table of ContentsI. Introduction 529II. Government Support for Higher Education 531A. Higher Education as an Investment in Human Capital 532B. The Demand for Skilled Labor and Social Mobility 548C. Values-Based Arguments for Higher Education Funding 551D . Education Funding and Independent Research 553E. Higher Education Funding Options: Student Debt or General Taxes 555III. U.S. Federal Student Loan Programs 560A. Student Eligibility Criteria Are Generally Not Risk-Based 561B. Only Exceptionally Poorly Performing Institutions Are Excluded 562C. Borrowing Limits Depend on Grade Level and Dependent Status 564D. Federal Student Loan Pricing is Statutory, Not Risk-Based 565IV. Higher Education and Labor Market Coordination Problems 567A. Students as Customers Create Pressure to Reduce Academic Standards 567B. Educational Institutions May Have Incentives to Funnel Students into Areas That Do Not Maximize Students' Future Incomes or Employment Prospects 570C. Many Students May Not Understand the Connection Between Their Chosen Course of Study and Future Income and Employment Prospects 583D. Skilled Labor Markets Suffer from Periodic Booms and Busts 587E. Skills Mismatches Reduce Employment and Output 588V. The Theory of Risk-Based Credit Pricing 589A. A Simple Risk-Based Credit Pricing Model 594B. Data-Driven Risk-Based Pricing 596C. Risk-Based Pricing Is Not Necessarily the Same as Market-Based Pricing 597D. Government's Incentives Are Uniquely Well Aligned with Students' 599E. Forecasting Change Is Both Necessary and Perilous 602F. Private Lenders Could Be Enlisted to Correct Forecast Errors 606G. Limited Dischargeability of Student Loans in Bankruptcy Reduces Lender Incentives to Monitor Students and Risk -Adjust Student Loan Pricing 607H. Income-Based Repayment Plans 617VI. Ethical Considerations and the Limits of Risk-Based Pricing 620A. Factors That Predict Student Loan Defaults 620B. Preserving Equal Opportunity, Social Mobility, and Individual Choice ...... …
Regulation and Contract Choice in the Distribution of Wine

The wine industry in the United States has grown tremendously over the past few decades, from fewer than 1,000 wineries in 1980 to upward of 8,500 today. The growth has occurred over a period that has seen substantial changes in the structure of the wine industry, the modes of distribution available to wineries, and the regulations governing them. Most economic research, however, has focused on supply relations between wineries and wine grape growers rather than between wineries and their downstream markets. In this article, we examine wineries' contracting behavior with downstream distributors and the effects of industry structure, winery organizational structure, and state laws regarding direct shipment and distribution franchise laws. (JEL Classifications: D23, L14, L22, L66)
The costs of shared ownership: Evidence from international joint ventures

Abstract This paper analyzes the determinants of partial ownership of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms and, in particular, the marked decline in the use of joint ventures over the last 20 years. The evidence indicates that whole ownership is most common when firms coordinate integrated production activities across different locations, transfer technology, and benefit from worldwide tax planning. Because operations and ownership levels are jointly determined, it is helpful to use the liberalization of ownership restrictions by host countries and the imposition of joint venture tax penalties in the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986 as instruments for ownership levels to identify these effects. Firms responded to these regulatory and tax changes by using wholly owned affiliates instead of joint ventures and expanding intrafirm trade and technology transfer. The implied complementarity of whole ownership and intrafirm trade suggests that the reduced costs of engaging in integrated global operations contributed substantially to the sharply declining propensity of American firms to organize their foreign operations as joint ventures over the last two decades. Estimates imply that as much as one-fifth to three-fifths of the decline in the use of joint ventures by multinational firms is attributable to the increased importance of intrafirm transactions. The forces of globalization appear to have diminished, rather than accelerated, the use of shared ownership.
Flood Money: The Challenge of U.S. Flood Insurance Reform in a Warming World

Congress’s reforms of the National Flood Insurance Program (“NFIP”) in 2014 continued its misguided approach to flood insurance policy, ignoring the increased risks of floods posed by climate change and giving generous subsidies to flood-prone properties. The Article analyzes the recent reforms against a backdrop of the NFIP’s history, impacts, and structure, and makes recommendations for steps Congress should take when it revisits the program in 2017. The NFIP has encouraged retention of older flood-prone properties and building in flood-prone areas, which makes little sense given the risks we face. The NFIP, deeply in debt to the Treasury Department, rests in part on an approach to flood risk where risks are pooled but what individuals pay is often not based on actual flood risk. This solidaristic approach to flood risk, where the government subsidizes hundreds of thousands of flood policies, is not based on need or any other credible policy principle. Further, the justifications for continuing the subsidies are weak when compared to other contexts where the federal government has been involved in solidaristic approaches to insurance such as the Affordable *2014 Jennifer Wriggins. All rights reserved. Sumner T. Bernstein Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law. Acknowledgments: Many thanks to American University-Washington College of Law for allowing me to present a draft of this article in a faculty workshop, to the Rutgers Center for Risk & Responsibility for the opportunity to discuss some of these issues in a preliminary fashion in September 2013, to Kenneth Abraham, Dave Owen, and Adam Scales for reviewing drafts, to Peter Byrne, Mary L. Bonauto, R.J. Lehmann, Andrew Moylan, Martha McCluskey, Alan Morrison, Fernanda Nicola, and Susan Carle for useful conversations, and to Heidi Gage for invaluable assistance. I am grateful to have been a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University School of Law while writing this Article and appreciate the stimulating community and excellent library and staff support this opportunity provided. Thanks also to the librarians at the University of Maine School of Law, especially Sherry McCall, Maureen Quinlan, and Julie Welch. WRIGGINS FINAL [SEND TO PRINT] (1) (DO NOT DELETE) 1/15/2015 3:26 PM 362 PENN STATE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 119:2 Care Act, unemployment insurance, and promoting insurance in urban areas. Congress should gradually remove flood insurance subsidies, fund accurate maps, and allow rates to be based on risk. Because flood insurance is mandatory for mortgage-holders in flood-prone areas, and risk-based rates may be overly harsh for low-income homeowners, a limited means-tested program should be passed which would allow these homeowners to receive insurance at reduced rates.
ANTITRUST AND COMPETITION IN TWO-SIDED MARKETS

This article extends antitrust analysis to two-sided markets in which a virtual monopolist competes with local bricks-and-mortar dealers. The discussion examines the market power of an Internet market maker as well as an Internet matchmaker. The analysis shows that equilibrium in a two-sided market can be characterized as a one-sided market in which transaction demand depends on the bid-ask spread of the central market maker. This allows for a straightforward extension of critical demand elasticity and critical loss analysis from one-sided markets to two-sided markets, with antitrust tests based on the hypothetical monopolist's bid-ask spread. Antitrust analysis of a one-sided market also carries over to a two-sided market with a matchmaker where antitrust tests are based on the sum of participation fees.
Optimal collusion with private information

We analyze collusion in an infinitely repeated Bertrand game, where prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed, i.i.d. cost shock in each period. Productive efficiency is possible only if high-cost firms relinquish market share. In the most profitable collusive schemes, firms implement productive efficiency, and high-cost firms are favored with higher expected market share in future periods. If types are discrete, there exists a discount factor strictly less than one above which first-best profits can be attained using history-dependent reallocation of market share between equally efficient firms. We also analyze the role of communication and side-payments.