cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Domestic Violence and State Intervention in the American West and Australia, 1860-1930

This Article calls into question stereotypical assumptions about the presumed lack of state intervention in the family and the patriarchal violence of Anglo-American frontier societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By analyzing previously unexamined cases of domestic assault and homicide in the American West and Australia, Professor Ramsey reveals a sustained (but largely ineffectual) effort to civilize men by punishing violence against women. Husbands in both the American West and Australia were routinely arrested or summoned to court for beating their wives in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Judges, police officers, journalists, and others expressed dismay over domestic assaults. However, legal authorities struggled with the dilemma of how to deter batterers whose victims were reluctant to prosecute. To be sure, the state's response was not as aggressive as under modern mandatory arrest laws and no-drop prosecution policies. Yet the "why didn't she leave?" question actually may have seemed easier to answer in the late 1800s and early 1900s than it did later in the twentieth century. Due to the failure of the state to prevent recidivist domestic violence, juries and even judges often deemed the actions of women who killed their abusive husbands wholly or partially justified. In contrast, husbands who killed their wives tended to be convicted of murder because their crimes violated the ideal of the, "respectable family man" that was vital to the efforts of both the American West and Australia to project a civilized image. This Article makes three contributions. First, it presents a complex and surprising picture of gender relations in the American West and Australia by showing that men punished other men for physically attacking their wives and that there was greater public concern about violent marriages than scholars have realized. Second, it documents the criminal prosecution of wife beaters and wife killers on two continents during a seventy-year period, which indicates that this was not just an isolated peak of intervention in a long history of apathy toward domestic violence. Third, Professor Ramsey shows that scholarly emphasis on women's insanity claims has obscured the extent to which female defendants successfully raised self-defense arguments to obtain acquittal or mitigation in intimate-partner murder cases. The justification of abused women's use of deadly force acknowledged the desperate circumstances they faced in societies that condemned domestic violence, but had neither succeeded in deterring it, nor provided victims with adequate escape routes.
Effect of Utility Deregulation and Mergers on Consumer Welfare

In the late 1990s, many U.S. states deregulated electric utilities, allowing for competition among power generators. Deregulated states then adopted retail choice programs, allowing customers to choose their power provider. In addition, a significant merger wave among large utilities ensued. How did these events impact consumer welfare? This study examines the effects of utility deregulation and mergers, by analyzing electricity price and output changes among deregulated and regulated states. I find that deregulation may have had a positive effect when states adopted certain measures, such as retail choice or fuel changes, that enhanced competition and lowered costs. Mergers also affected consumer welfare, with differential impacts found between the merger of generation firms versus the merger of generation and transmission companies.
The compatibility of durable goods with contingent generic consumables

Abstract Many durable products provide value only when used together with contingent services or consumable components, e.g. light fixtures (bulbs), printers (ink), electronics (batteries). Consumers need only have access to the contingent consumable components to continue to derive service from a durable. In fact, many firms rely primarily upon the revenues generated from the contingent services or consumables as the primary source of profitability, e.g. giving away the razors to make money on the blades. Such firms often invest considerable effort into making sure that consumers of their durables are held captive to their own branded consumables by impeding their access to generically available consumables. They do so by designing their products in such a way that they are not readily compatible with the generic consumables. We consider the implications of competition from third-party manufacturers that can provide generic consumables and the manufacturer’s production decisions of a durable good under such contingencies. This allows us to draw managerial insights about how a firm should decide on his product compatibility and production quantity when the generic contingent consumables enter the market.
A Reader's Companion to Against Prediction: A Reply to Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir on Economic Modeling, Selective Incapacitation, Governmentality, and Race

From parole prediction instruments and violent sexual predator scores to racial profiling on the highways, instruments to predict future dangerousness, drug-courier profiles, and IRS computer algorithms to detect tax evaders, the rise of actuarial methods in the field of crime and punishment presents a number of challenging issues at the intersection of economic theory, sociology, history, race studies, criminology, social theory, and law. The three review articles of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age by Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir, raise these challenges in their very best light. Ranging from the heights of poststructuralist and critical race theory to the intricate details of mathematical economics and criminological analysis, the articles apply different disciplinary lenses to the analysis of the actuarial turn offered in Against Prediction and set forth both substantive and structural challenges to the book. By means of a detailed reply to the three reviews, this article provides a reader's companion to Against Prediction.
Religious Truth, Pluralism, and Secularization: The Shaking Foundations of American Religious Liberty

Twenty years ago, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to religious liberty. In Employment Division v. Smith,2 the Court effectively overturned a quarter century of constitutional doctrine, reducing the protection of the Free Exercise Clause, in large measure, to an equality right as opposed to a liberty right. Under the Court’s prior doctrine, the Free Exercise Clause required serious constitutional scrutiny of laws that imposed substantial burdens on religiously motivated conduct, scrutiny that sometimes resulted in constitutionally required, religionbased exemptions for the religious believers whose freedom the laws impaired.3 According to Smith, by contrast, the Free Exercise Clause generally offers no protection for religiously motivated conduct, no matter how great the burden on religious liberty. It protects religious
Capital Accounts in LLCs and in Partnerships: Powerful Default Rules and Potential Tax Significance

Balance sheets for limited liability companies and for partnerships differ from corporate balance sheets in one important respect. Accounting for these alternative forms traditionally includes a separate equity account, or “capital account,” for each owner. Accounting practice and caselaw suggest that, at least as a default rule or norm, these accounts guide distributions on liquidation or buyout, and, if negative, may also reflect debts to the firm. Indeed, the statutory default rule of partnership law in most states requires that individual capital accounts be maintained and given economic significance on liquidation or buyout. Although the statutory law of LLCs does not contain these default rules, partnership law provides analogy. Furthermore, the federal income tax rules that apply both to partnerships and to most multi-member LLCs closely examine the maintenance and significance of capital accounts to determine the validity of special allocations of tax benefits. Finally, capital accounts analysis also sharpens the understanding of the economic arrangement of the owners, particularly with respect to how and to what extent they have agreed to share different items of loss.
e-mediation: Evaluating the impacts of an electronic mediator on negotiating behavior

In this article, the results of three experiments designed to evaluate the impact of an electronic mediator on negotiating behavior are reported. The mediator is a web-based tool that serves three mediation functions: diagnosis, analysis, and advice. The diagnosis provides information about progress toward or away from agreements. The analysis identifies the possible sources of problems in each of several areas of negotiation. The advice is linked to the source of the problem and based on empirical research. In all of the experiments, role-playing negotiators attempted to reach agreement on seven issues discussed in a simulation of a conflict that resembles the pre-war conflict between the United States and Iraq. The first experiment consisted of a comparison between the e-mediation support technology and a condition in which negotiators reflected separately about the negotiation without the technology. Results indicate that access to the technology produced significantly more agreements and resulted in more positive perceptions of the outcomes than the reflection condition. However, perceptions of the between-round periods were more positive for reflection-condition negotiators. In the second experiment, we compared the e-mediation technology with a condition in which negotiators only received the advice in paper form. Access to the technology resulted in more agreements than advice-only, although the differences were smaller than those obtained in the first experiment, and perceptions of outcomes were more positive for advice-only negotiators. The third experiment compared two forms of e-mediation (separate and joint) with a scripted live mediator. Results show that joint e-mediation out-performs live mediation on some measures; both these conditions resulted in more agreements, and more integrative statements, than separate e-mediation. The live mediator was perceived more favorably than both the separate and joint e-mediators. Possible explanations for these results are discussed along with an agenda for further research on e-mediation.
Incomplete Contracts and the Product Cycle

The incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions limits the extent to which the production process can be fragmented across borders. In a dynamic, general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade, the incompleteness of international contracts is shown to lead to the emergence of product cycles. Because of contractual frictions, goods are initially manufactured in the North, where product development takes place. As the good matures and becomes more standardized, the manufacturing stage of production is shifted to the South to benefit from lower wages. Following the property-rights approach to the theory of the firm, the same force that creates product cycles, i.e., incomplete contracts, opens the door to a parallel analysis of the determinants of the mode of organization. The model gives rise to a new version of the product cycle in which manufacturing is shifted to the South first within firm boundaries, and only at a later stage to independent firms in the South. Relative to a world with only arm’s length transacting, allowing for intrafirm production transfer by multinational fi rms is shown to accelerate the shift of production towards the South, while having an ambiguous effect on relative wages. The model delivers macroeconomic implications that complement the work of Krugman (1979), as well as microeconomic implications consistent with the findings of the empirical literature on the product cycle.
The Trend in Firm Profitability and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

ABSTRACT: This study shows that the recent trajectory of a firm's profits predicts future profitability and stock returns. The predictive information contained in the trend of profitability is not subsumed by the level of profitability, earnings momentum, or other well-known determinants of stock returns. The profit trend also predicts the earnings surprise one quarter later, and analyst forecast errors over the following 12 months, suggesting that sophisticated investors underreact to the information in the profit trend. On the other hand, we find no evidence of investor overreaction, and our results cannot be explained by well-known risk factors. JEL Classifications: G12; G14.
Is technological innovativeness one behavior or many

A major criticism of research on technological innovation is the inconsistency of findings across studies. One explanation for this inconsistency may be the multiple conceptualizations of innovation used in the literature. In this study, four behaviors of innovativeness are reviewed. Factors affecting each behavior are then empirically examined indicating that the behaviors result from different factors. To ensure that future research does not simply create mini-theories of different aspects of innovation, a schema for integrating the different conceptualizations is proposed. Results of an illustrative analysis using this schema is then presented.
Feminist (or "Feminist") Reform of Self-Defense Law: Some Critical Reflections

This essay, which is a revised version of the George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law, which the author gave at Marquette University,and which has been subsequently published in 93 Marq. U. L. Rev. 1475 (2010), critically considers recent proposals (some of which have been successful) to expand the scope of self-defense law, and which to differing degrees have been advocated by persons who characterize themselves as feminists.
Asymmetric English auctions

Abstract This paper studies equilibria of the n-bidder single-object English, or open ascending price, auction in a setting with interdependent values and asymmetric bidders. Maskin (in: H. Siebert (Ed.), Privatization, Institut fur Weltwirtschaften der Universitat Kiel, Kiel, 1992, pp. 115–136.) showed that if the values satisfy a “single crossing” condition, then the two-bidder English auction has an efficient equilibrium. In this paper, two extensions of the single crossing condition, the “average crossing” condition and the “cyclical crossing” condition, are introduced. The main result is that under either of these conditions the n-bidder English auction has an efficient equilibrium.
Product Innovations, Advertising, and Stock Returns:

Abstract Under increased scrutiny from top management and shareholders, marketing managers feel the need to measure and communicate the impact of their actions on shareholder returns. In particular, how do customer value creation (through product innovation) and customer value communication (through marketing investments) affect stock returns? This article examines, conceptually and empirically, how product innovations and marketing investments for such product innovations lift stock returns by improving the outlook on future cash flows. The authors address these questions with a large-scale econometric analysis of product innovation and associated marketing mix in the automobile industry. They find that adding such marketing actions to the established finance benchmark model greatly improves the explained variance in stock returns. In particular, investors react favorably to companies that launch pioneering innovations, that have higher perceived quality, that are backed by substantial advertising suppor...
EFFICIENCY BOUNDS FOR SEMIPARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF INVERSE CONDITIONAL-DENSITY-WEIGHTED FUNCTIONS

Consider the unconditional moment restriction E[m(y, υ, w; π0)/fV|w (υ|w) −s (w; π0)] = 0, where m(·) and s(·) are known vector-valued functions of data (y┬, υ, w┬)┬. The smallest asymptotic variance that -consistent regular estimators of π0 can have is calculated when fV|w(·) is only known to be a bounded, continuous, nonzero conditional density function. Our results show that “plug-in” kernel-based estimators of π0 constructed from this type of moment restriction, such as Lewbel (1998, Econometrica 66, 105–121) and Lewbel (2007, Journal of Econometrics 141, 777–806), are semiparametric efficient.
Political economy of income distribution dynamics

Abstract Income distribution varies considerably across countries; it tends to become more equal with development in some countries, but just the opposite occurs in other countries. This paper provides a theoretical investigation of the persistent differences in income distribution across countries over time. Motivated by the relationship between income distribution and public spending at different school levels for a broad range of countries over the past 30 years, the analysis centers on the role of public education where specific investments interact with political involvement by different socio-economic groups. Socio-economic groups may form lobbies to influence education policy making. The formation of lobbies is endogenous. Persistent inequality is caused by persistent lobbying efforts of the wealthy that lead to an allocation of public education spending more biased toward them.
Imagining the Unimaginable: Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

had under the trustees' allocation. With the assistance of an experienced Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) mediator, the group of PRPs did significant work to determine their divisible share of the 1,527 DSAY liability for settlement purposes. They also identified a habitat restoration project with high DSAY value, as requested by the trustees. The restoration project is the relocation of a levee on the Puyallup River, which is upstream of Commencement Bay. The project will create an estimated 66 acres of salmon spawning habitat, and will create enough environmental benefits, as measured in DSAYs, to cover the 258 DSAY liability that the trustees ultimately attributed to those PRPs. The trustees agreed to settle the NRD claims against the twenty-two PRPs in the group in exchange for the PRP group's agreement to: ( 1 ) fund the levee relocation project (which will be performed by Pierce County, Washington, which owns the property); (2) pay $1.794 million for the PRPs' allocable share of the trustees' past damage assessment costs; and (3) pay $150,000 for costs to the trustees of overseeing the project. While negotiating this settlement took considerable effort on the part of both the trustees and the PRPs, the parties worked diligently and efficiently and came to a settlement in principle relatively quickly, certainly in CERCLA terms. A consent decree was lodged in April 2006, and after receiving no comments on it, the trustees moved to enter the decree in June 2006. United States v. AOL Express, Civ. No. C06-5204RJB (W.D. Wash. June 16, 2006). This successful settlement reflects the efforts of a group of PRPs to resolve their NRD claims through mediation quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively. The ultimate cost to the PRPs of funding the levee relocation project is likely to be considerably below the trustees' cash-out figure of $52,000 per DSAY. It also reflects the efforts of the trustees to enter into good-faith negotiations and respond quickly to a time-sensitive restoration proposal (the PRPs hope to begin funding the project this summer). And of course, the settlement will provide a high-value restoration project that will greatly increase salmon spawning habitat, meeting the goals of the NRD statutes at issue.
"We the People," Constitutional Accountability, and Outsourcing Government

The ubiquitous outsourcing of federal functions to private contractors, although benign in the main, raises the most fundamental of constitutional questions: What institutions and actors comprise the “federal government” itself? From Abu Ghraib to Blackwater, a string of scandals has heightened public awareness that highly sensitive federal powers and responsibilities are routinely entrusted to government contractors. At the same time, the American populace seems vaguely aware that, when it comes to ensuring accountability for errors and abuses of power, contractors occupy a special space. The fact is that myriad structural and procedural means for holding traditionally government actors accountable do not apply to private contractors exercising identical powers. This accountability vacuum is not remedied by prevailing constitutional doctrine, which ignores the realities of modern government by drawing an artificial line between the public and private spheres. I have thus argued previously that all private contractors should be viewed as anatomically related to other quasi-government entities such as independent agencies, residing along a single continuum of constitutional accountability. This Article builds on that premise by positing that private-public relationships be structured to ensure accountability as a matter of constitutional law.
An Empirical Exploration of a Technology Race

An extensive theoretical literature examines technological competition, and in particular whether leaders maintain their standing. These models, however, have received little empirical support. I examine innovation in the disk drive industry, an environment particularly conducive to identifying racing behavior. Strategic variables prove significant in explaining the decision to innovate. The patterns are in accord with Reinganum's work: firms that trail the leader innovate more. I add controls for technological opportunity, financing constraints, and firm turnover. When firms manufacture drives for internal use or there are many entrants, and strategic interactions may be less important, the effects are less pronounced.
The Case for Cooperative Territoriality in International Bankruptcy

Universalism the idea that a multinational debtor's "home country" should have worldwide jurisdiction over its bankruptcy has long had tremendous appeal to bankruptcy professionals. Yet, the international community repeatedly has refused to adopt conventions that would make universalism a reality. In an article published last year, I proposed an explanation.2 Universalism can work only in a world with essentially uniform laws governing bankruptcy and priority among creditors a world that does not yet exist. Because it is impossible to fix the location of a multinational company in a global economy, the introduction of universalism in current world circumstances would give each multinational company a choice of countries in which to file. By its choice, the company could choose not only the procedure for its bankruptcy, but also the substantive rights its creditors would have. Universalism would require other nations to recognize the effects of that strategic choice. Given the huge amounts of money potentially at stake, governments rightly fear that opportunism would run rampant.3 Universalists insist that the requirement that bankruptcies occur in the "home country" of the multinational company would prevent forum shopping. They premise their defense of universalism on the assumption that each multinational company would have one home country and that everyone could know in advance which it was.4 Yet,
Standing Room Only: Why Fourth Amendment Exclusion and Standing Can No Longer Logically Coexist

The Fourth Amendment protects the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and thus provides the constitutional source for our privacy from official observation. We can retreat into our homes and our personal papers and leave the government behind. This freedom, of course, is not absolute. The Fourth Amendment uses the words “probable cause” and “unreasonable searches,” and the Supreme Court has interpreted these phrases to mean that when police acquire information reliably linking a person to a crime, they can invade that person’s privacy to uncover evidence of misdeeds. In the presence of probable cause, then, the freedom from surveillance contracts, and the State’s power to protect against crime accordingly expands. “Probable cause,” however, is not certainty. Police will often prove to have been mistaken in their selection of targets for official investigation. Innocent people will appear guilty and thus lose some of their well-deserved privacy. Guilty people will seem innocent and consequently maintain an undeserved freedom from exposure. To demand perfection from the police—either in avoiding searches of the innocent or in pursuing searches of the guilty—would be unrealistic and unfair, because the police are only human. Because of the imperfect, human nature of police officers, probable cause can only approximate objective reality. The objective state of affairs it aims to approximate is this: only searches of guilty people concealing evidence of crime ought to occur. The approximation itself, however, derives from the standpoint of the particular police officer. A
Fiduciary Duties and Exculpatory Clauses: Clash of the Titans or Cozy Bedfellows?

Centuries ago, when land represented the majority of wealth, the trust was used primarily for holding and transferring real property. As the dominant form of wealth moved away from family land, the trust evolved into a device for managing financial assets. With this transformation came the use of exculpatory clauses by both amateur and professional trustees, providing an avenue for these fiduciaries to escape liability for designated acts. With the use of exculpatory provisions, discussion abounded about whether fiduciary duties were mandatory or subject to modification. The latter view eventually prevailed, with the majority of jurisdictions viewing fiduciary duties as default rules; that is, part of a private agreement around which the parties are free to contract. Contracting around fiduciary duties is of particular concern when a lawyer suggests himself for a fiduciary role and inserts an exculpatory clause into the governing instrument. Although the lawyer is subject to applicable legal ethics rules, such as those which govern communications and conflicts of interest, this contractarian view of the attorney-client relationship is less than ideal, especially when lawyers and non-lawyer professionals are involved in a reciprocal referral agreement. During the recent revisions to the UPC, mandates relating to the default nature of fiduciary duties were not addressed. Perhaps this was because the matter was outside the scope of the revisionists’ review, or perhaps the drafters of the revisions were comfortable with the recent position the Uniform Trust Code and the Restatement of Trusts have taken on exculpatory clauses. However, the UPC revisions should have addressed this matter with specificity. Given public policy concerns, client protection, fiduciary responsibilities, and the professional responsibility of lawyers, it may be that the standard of prudence should not be abandoned so easily.
The Fraudulent Case Against Affirmative Action: The Untold Story Behind Fisher v. University of Texas

For over thirty-five years, the Supreme Court has grappled with the controversial issue of affirmative action and race preference. Beginning with Justice Lewis Powell’s influential opinion in Bakke v. U. Cal. Davis in 1978, leeway has been permitted for admissions policies that take account of race, as long as it is not given determinative weight so as to exclude consideration of nonminority candidates, or used to set quotas. As the Court has become increasingly conservative, however, its license for race preference has tightened considerably, and it has become receptive to "reverse discrimination" plaintiffs challenging such policies in universities and the workplace. Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) purported to immunize good faith race-conscious university admissions for a period of twenty-five years, but with the retirement of its author, Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court chose to revisit the matter in Fisher v. University of Texas, decided on June 24. While remanding to the lower courts without a definitive ruling on UT’s program, it is the contention of this article that the decision may well seal the fate of race-sensitive decision-making by public actors. Seven justices, over the dissent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sign onto an exacting strict scrutiny standard of review anachronistically borrowed from cases challenging pernicious discrimination motivated by a desire to exclude and subjugate disfavored groups. This "searching" examination, which treats affirmative action in the interest of diversity as inherently suspect and presumptively unlawful, is unjustified legally and unwise as a matter of policy. Implicitly, the Court adopts a paradigm of white male victimhood, which has turned anti-discrimination provisions on their head.The article also challenges the contention that affirmative action inevitably sacrifices "merit" to preference, by confronting the misconceptions regarding merit, and particularly the glorification of standardized testing.
Disappearing Private Reputations in Long-Run Relationships

For games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring, Cripps, Mailath, and Samuelson (2004) showed that an informed player facing short-lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types. This paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long-lived and has private beliefs, so that the informed player’s reputation is private. Journal of Economic Literature Classi…cation Numbers C70, C78.
Who Trades With Whom? Individuals, Institutions, and Returns

I study the relation between price changes and the interaction of individual investors and financial institutions. Using the complete records of all trading in Finland over a nine-year period, I find that prices move consistently when individuals trade with institutions. Specifically, at daily, weekly, or monthly horizons, prices increase when individual investors sell shares to institutions, and decrease when individuals buy shares from institutions. Prices do not move consistently when individuals trade with other individuals or when institutions trade with other institutions. However, when price movements are caused by trading among individuals, they are quickly reversed. Moreover, these reversals occur because institutions trade with individuals to push prices toward previous levels. The results suggest that prices move in response to institutional trading, and individuals supply liquidity to institutions.
Reconciling the Juridical Links Doctrine with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Article III

Consider the following class action involving the cable television industry: Acme Cable, which provides service to all subscribers in Maintown, charges its customers a substantial late fee, which may amount to unenforceable liquidated damages. Other cable companies throughout the state levy similar or identical charges on their customers.1 After locating John Doe, an aggrieved resident of Maintown, an attorney initiates a class action on behalf of Doe and all other similarly situated parties against twenty-six cable operators throughout the state (Acme through Zydeco). Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure ("Federal Rules"), this litigation could take one of two forms: (1) using Rule 23, a plaintiff class of consumers could sue a defendant class of cable companies (a bilateral class action);2 or (2) a Rule 23 plaintiff class of consumers might individually join all twentysix defendants through Rule 20.3 Because he has only been injured by Acme, Doe lacks a valid cause of action against the other twenty-five cable defendants. Doe may, however, escape this predicament. Although courts generally require that the class representative have a cause of action against each defendant, there are two exceptions to this requirement: "(1) Situations in which all injuries are the result of a conspiracy or concerted schemes between the defendants ... and (2) Instances in which all defendants are juridically related in a manner that suggests a single
Testing Labor Market Efficiency Across Position Groups in the NFL

This article proposes a new metric to proxy for the incidence of player absences faced by National Football League teams based on the percentage of team payroll resources that are inactive over the...
When do employers benefit from offering workers a financial reward for reporting internal misconduct

Abstract Some employers offer workers financial rewards for reporting internal misconduct that harms the employer, and recent press articles suggest more employers should adopt this practice to increase the rate of internal whistleblowing. However, rewards are costly, and no consensus exists about whether employers ultimately benefit from offering them. I analyze the cost-benefit tradeoff facing employers as they decide whether to offer whistleblowing rewards and find that as the pre-existing rate of internal whistleblowing increases, the incremental expected cost of offering a reward increases relative to the incremental expected benefit. Consequently, the net expected economic effect of offering a reward is a function of the current rate of whistleblowing in the firm. I predict and, using an experiment, find that the level of fixed compensation paid to workers and the extent to which they believe reporting internal misconduct constitutes a moral obligation affect the pre-existing rate of internal whistleblowing, with the rate increasing as these two factors increase. Further, I also predict and find that an increase in either factor tempers the net economic benefit of offering a whistleblowing reward. My results suggest that certain types of employers are more likely than others to benefit economically from offering a financial reward for internal whistleblowing, which can help explain the variation observed in practice with respect to employers’ use of this approach. I discuss this and other implications of my findings.
The Social Network Effect The Determinants of Giving Through Social Media

Social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Crowdrise offer new ways for nonprofits to engage the community in fundraising efforts. This study employs data from Facebook Causes to...
Aspects of Moral Change in India, 1990–2006: Evidence from Public Attitudes toward Tax Evasion and Bribery

Summary Observers have asserted that India’s economic rise coincides with moral change. This study assesses some notable aspects of this claim by using public attitudes toward tax evasion and bribery as indicators of moral values. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the World Values Surveys, I find that tolerance for tax evasion and bribery grew relatively slightly from 1991 to 1996, and then increased rapidly from 2001 to 2006. Double-interaction regression models show tolerance converging by gender and religion, and tolerance diverging between the poor and non-poor. However, the regional patterns are complex. Finally, university educational attainment is associated with decreasing tolerance.
Third-party Copyright Liability after Grokster

This Article, the original version of which was published in the Minnesota Law Review (vol. 91, pp. 184 - 240), studies the construction of third party copyright liability after the recent Supreme Court case Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. This inquiry is important because third party copyright liability has become a controversial area of law that affects the viability of entire industries. Unfortunately, the law governing third party copyright liability is unclear. Grokster involved a claim of third party liability against defendants whose technology supported the sharing of music over the Internet, and it represents the Supreme Court's attempt to bring coherence to the relevant law. Grokster is a difficult case to understand. It added a new cause of action for inducement to the law of third party copyright liability, but the meaning of inducement is unclear, especially when one considers the incoherent structure of pre-Grokster law. Future courts will find it challenging to interpret Grokster in a way that creates an effective, coherent structure for the law third party copyright liability. This Article was among the first to comprehensively analyze Grokster and its effect on the theory and construction of third party copyright liability in the United States. This effort includes a survey of pre-Grokster law, the application of tort theory to expose the structure of conflicts in the law, an explanation of the rationale and implications of Grokster, and the construction of a coherent framework for third party copyright liability. The Article concludes that Grokster made important theoretical and practical choices about the law that are appropriately sensitive to the costs and benefits of third party copyright liability.
Optimal Cost Targets and Incentives for Acquiring Expertise

This paper studies the optimal choice of cost standards (or cost targets) over time in an agency setting in which a worker is responsible for both implementing actions and acquiring skill/expertise that would enable him to improve his future performance with respect to those actions. We characterize the effect of the decision horizon and the observability of the worker's acquired expertise on both the optimal path of cost standards and the worker's investments in expertise. In addition, we characterize the trade-off between motivating the worker's investment in expertise and motivating his efficient use of the expertise.
Geeksploitation: Optimism and Monitoring-Aversion in Agency Relationships

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses the contracting implications of New Economy firms: informal, flexible organizations predominantly staffed by younger workers. The model incorporates two findings from the behavioral economics literature. First, workers may overestimate their own productivity (optimism). Second, workers may be monitoring-averse, with intense monitoring undermining intrinsic motivation. The combination of behavioral traits and work setting has deleterious consequences for workers. Despite higher monetary compensation and sometimes weaker incentives, they work harder in equilibrium, experience a higher disutility of effort than conventional workers, and also have a utility realization that is lower on average than their reservation utility. Optimism and monitoring-aversion are mutually reinforcing. When private information is introduced, both high- and low-productivity unconventional workers benefit, in contrast to standard agency models with asymmetric information. Both types of agents still e...
The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations

Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) microdata over the 1980-2010 period, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably during this time. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution than at the middle or bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human-capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women's work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high-skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than, say, occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences.
Marriage and Parenthood as Status and Rights: The Growing, Problematic and Possibly Constitutional Trend to Disaggregate Family Status from Family Rights

There is a growing trend in family law to sever family rights from family status. Courts and legislatures increasingly recognize a variety of different family forms by granting the legal incidents of family relationship (such as civil unions for same-sex couples or de facto parenthood for caretakers), without granting family status (marriage or parenthood per se). This Article explores this trend by unpacking the constitutional treatment of family relationship. It argues that when state constitutions and the Federal Constitution recognize a right to family status (marriage and parenthood per se), they are not only affording people the legal incidents of family relationship, they are honoring an expressive right to a label everyone understands. Yet this Article suggests that legal actors also often feel compelled (possibly even constitutionally compelled) to award the legal incidents of family relationship even in the absence of awarding status because the rights and obligations of family relationships provide critical sources of identity and autonomy for the people in those relationships. This Article concludes that although courts and legislatures may be attracted to the idea of severing rights from status because it seems to protect alternative families without altering traditional family status categories, ultimately this trend to disaggregate rights from status may undermine legal protection of both traditional and nontraditional family relationships.
Norms in Sports Contests: The Tour de France

Profit-maximizing organizers of sports contests have an incentive to implement rules that increase the attractiveness of sports contest for spectators. But prohibitively high enforcement costs can prevent organizers from implementing certain rules. We argue that in these instances unofficial norms can potentially complement the official rules and add to the attractiveness of a contest. If contest participants who have an encompassing interest in the contest face low enough monitoring and sanctioning costs, they can enforce unofficial norms among themselves. Thus, organizers of sports contests may find it beneficial to avoid instituting rules that inhibit the emergence of unofficial norms. We provide evidence in support of our contention from the Tour de France.
Metals alter membership but not diversity of a headwater stream microbiome

ABSTRACT Metal contamination from mining or natural weathering is a common feature of surface waters in the American west. Advances in microbial analyses have created the potential for routine sampling of aquatic microbiomes as a tool to assess the quality of stream habitat. We sought to determine if microbiome diversity and membership were affected by metal contamination and identify candidate microbial taxa to be used to indicate metal stress in stream ecosystems. We evaluated microbiome membership from sediments at multiple sites within the principal drainage of an EPA superfund site near the headwaters of the Upper Arkansas River, Leadville, CO. From each sample, we extracted DNA and sequenced the 16S rRNA gene amplicon on the Illumina MiSeq platform. We used the remaining sediments to simultaneously evaluate environmental metal concentrations. We also conducted an artificial stream mesocosm experiment using sediments collected from two of the observational study sites. The mesocosm experiment had a two-by-two factorial design: (i) location (upstream or downstream of contaminating tributary), and (ii) treatment (metal exposure or control). We found no difference in diversity between upstream and downstream sites in the field. Similarly, diversity changed very little following experimental metal exposure. However, microbiome membership differed between upstream and downstream locations and experimental metal exposure changed microbiome membership in a manner that depended on origin of the sediments used in each mesocosm. IMPORTANCE Our results suggest that microbiomes can be reliable indicators of ecosystem metal stress even when surface water chemistry and other metrics used to assess ecosystem health do not indicate ecosystem stress. Results presented in this study, in combination with previously published work on this same ecosystem, are consistent with the idea that a microbial response to metals at the base of the food web may be affecting primary consumers. If effects of metals are mediated through shifts in the microbiome, then microbial metrics, as presented here, may aid in the assessment of stream ecosystem health, which currently does not include assessments of the microbiome.
Option implied volatilities and the cost of issuing equity.

Abstract The structure of a firm-commitment Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) resembles a put-option underwritten by an investment bank syndicate (Smith, 1977). Employing implied volatilities from issuers’ stock options as a direct forward-looking measure, this paper examines the impact of expected price risk around SEO issue dates on the direct cost of issuing equity. Using a comprehensive sample of 1208 SEOs between 1996 and 2009, we find issuers with higher option implied volatilities raise less external equity capital and pay higher investment bank fees in the stock market, ceteris paribus. The effect of implied volatility on the investment bank fees is stronger for larger issuers with lower pre-SEO abnormal realized stock volatilities, and for SEOs with higher expected price pressures around issue dates. These relationships are robust to adjustments for correlations among control variables, sample selection bias and also simultaneous determination of offer size and SEO fees.
What’s Wrong with the HIPC Initiative and What’s Next?

This article reviews the problems of the enhanced HIPC initiative and outlines possible steps towards a more efficient debt and poverty reduction initiative. After brief comments on the rationale for debt relief, it analyses some key issues related to the HIPC initiative’s aim to achieve debt sustainability, describes other fundamental problems of the HIPC framework, and discusses some less known but still crucial flaws of the initiative. It then proceeds with necessary improvements for an efficient debt reduction programme, possible modifications for a revised HIPC initiative, and some suggestions on how to overcome financing constraints. Apart from being in several respects unfair, the current framework is unlikely to permit a lasting exit from unsustainable debt for many HIPCs, and may lead to a decline in traditional development assistance.
Law Making in the European Union: On Globalization and Contract Law in Divergent Legal Cultures

An important problem of law making in a globalizing world is how to deal with diverging national legal cultures. Since the emergence of the nation-state, law making has primarily been a task for the national legislatures and courts. They 'make' law for relatively homogeneous societies that are usually characterized by a common language and culture. As a result of increasing globalization, this is now rapidly changing. If the law is to retain its role of regulating society (be it no longer a national, but a global one), new ways of making and enforcing law have to be found. This article offers an account of how to deal with some questions caused by increasing globalization in the field of private law. This account is not a general and theoretical one, but one that is based on the experience of the European Union (EU) in the field of contract law. European contract law is thus used as paradigmatic for globalisation and private law as a whole. There is every reason to do so: the European Union has wide experience with making law for diverging jurisdictions. In addition to this, contract law can be considered one of the most important vehicles for globalization as it facilitates economic transactions.