cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Second Hand Smoke and Child Custody Determinations--A Relevant Factor or a Smoke Screen?

The thesis of this brief article is simply that the tobacco habits of a parent are relevant and worthy of consideration when a child is asthmatic, or suffers from some other definable medical condition which would be exacerbated by passive smoke. However, when the child is healthy and there exists no definitive shortitem medical risk, the issue should be irrelevant. In other words, the court should consider those factors, and only those factors, which are of significant importance to the child, such as stability, caretaker skills, home environment and the child's wishes.
The Kids Aren’t Alright: Rethinking the Law Student Skills Deficit

INTRODUCTION It’s whispered by colleagues in the law school halls. It’s lamented in faculty lounges. Incoming law students aren’t “what they used to be.” No one seems to define “what they used to be”—only that once upon a time, a better time, students were more prepared for law school, spent more time studying, and didn’t need so much support. Criticism of lackadaisical, underprepared, or unmotivated students has a long history, but recent research suggests that incoming law students are less prepared than previous generations of law students. Undergraduate education has changed over the last forty years. Many of today’s college graduates do not have the fundamental thinking and reasoning skills necessary to master the law school curriculum. College students spend less time studying during their undergraduate years. College students expect higher grades with considerably less effort than previous generations. Student evaluations of teaching influence undergraduate faculty, putting pressure on professors to award high grades in return for positive evaluations. College students learn to “game” their education, working less and receiving higher grades, but failing to acquire the thinking skills that provide the foundation for later success. These issues are not distributed equally across undergraduate colleges and universities; privileged students show gains in thinking skills while students from poorer backgrounds never catch up to their better-prepared peers. While these changes in undergraduate education have been hotly debated on college campuses since the 2011 publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, law schools have not been engaged in the discussion. Legal education has not dealt with changes that leave students less prepared for the type of disciplined thinking, close reading, and analytical rigor required to succeed in law school. This article examines empirical research on the changes in undergraduate education
Rethinking Lawyer Regulation: How a Relational Approach Would Improve Professional Rules and Roles

This Article offers both a way to understand emerging developments in the regulation of the legal profession in the United States and internationally, and an explanation for why these developments grounded in a relational perspective on lawyers and their work are likely to be more effective in encouraging lawyers to follow the legal ethics rules and to fulfill professional aspirations. The dominant United States approach to lawyer regulation is the command and control model that penalizes lawyers for failing to follow a lengthy set of prescribed rules. As theAarticle explains, this approach assumes – and reinforces the idea – that lawyers are Holmesian bad men who approach rules with the goal of figuring out what they can get away with within the bounds of the law. Such an approach will inevitably lead many lawyers to think of legal ethics rules as both the floor and ceiling of their aspirations, and will encourage lawyers to treat the rules instrumentally. In contrast, a principles-based approach similar to those in Australia and the United Kingdom, creates a system where regulators initially articulate a set of goals, and lawyers then work with the regulators to develop a plan for complying with those goals, including proactive programs to audit compliance. This approach acknowledges the reality that lawyers and regulators both function through a web of relationships and seeks to create incentives within those relationships for lawyers to comply with both the letter and the spirit of professional regulations. Lawyers who help develop their own plans would have an incentive to follow them, and they could create plans through law firms or, if they are in small or solo practices, through plans they develop in groups sponsored by bar associations. As a historical note, we also offer an explanation for the much-noted evolution of legal ethics rules from aspirations to black letter law during the course of the Twentieth Century. A relational understanding of lawyers supported the aspirational approach, while an atomistic view led to formal rules. Today, in order to restore professional respirations, the community of lawyers needs to achieve a balance between rules and aspirations that can only occur within a relational framework that acknowledges that lawyers are both individuals and members of communities.
Between data cleaning and inference: Pre-averaging and robust estimators of the efficient price ☆

Abstract Pre-averaging is a popular strategy for mitigating microstructure in high frequency financial data. As the term suggests, transaction or quote data are averaged over short time periods ranging from 30 s to five min, and the resulting averages approximate the efficient price process much better than the raw data. Apart from reducing the size of the microstructure, the methodology also helps synchronise data from different securities. The procedure is robust to short term dependence in the noise. Since averages can be subject to outliers, and since they can pulverise jumps, we have developed a broader theory which also applies to cases where M-estimation is used to pin down the efficient price in local neighbourhoods. M-estimation serves the same function as averaging, but we shall see that it is safer. Good choices of M-estimating function greatly enhance the identification of jumps. The methodology applies off-the-shelf to any high frequency econometric problem. In this paper, we develop a general theory for pre-averaging and M-estimation based inference. We show that, up to a contiguity adjustment, the estimated process behaves as if one sampled from a semimartingale (with unchanged volatility) plus an independent error. Estimating the efficient price is a form of pre-processing of the data, and hence the methods in this paper also serve the purpose of data cleaning.
Napoleon, Bourses, and Growth in Latin America

The value of equity market transactions in emerging economies soared from about 2 percent of the world total in 1986 to 12 percent in 1996. This boom was accompanied by an explosion of international capital flows, especially flows into developing country stock markets. Moreover, while equity flows were a negligible part of capital flows to emerging markets a decade ago, equity flows now represent about 20 percent of private capital flows to developing nations.
A tragedy of the anticommons: local option taxation and cell phone tax bills

When multiple taxing jurisdictions overlap and fail to account for one another’s actions, they over-tax the common base. This is a prediction of the anticommons model, in which numerous parties have authority to exclude others from using a resource. This model further predicts that when governments over-tax the base, private parties will underutilize the resource, and underutilization will be greater as the number of parties with exclusion rights rises. We test these predictions by studying cell phone taxation and local option tax authority, which allows some cities, counties, and special-purpose districts to levy taxes on cell phone use. Consistent with theory, we find that the tax rate on cell phone service is higher when local governments have the option to tax. Further, the percentage of households owning cell phones is lower when there is the local option to tax, and ownership rates fall with the number of taxes levied.
The environmental role of agriculture in an era of carbon caps.

This article evaluates programs that build on the claim that greenhouse-gas reductions from agriculture can rival the climate-change benefits of switching to low-carbon energy supplies. The Article examines strengths and weaknesses in existing biofuels regulation, including especially the influence of special-interest politics on underreporting the international climate-related effects caused by planting more acreage to corn to produce corn-based ethanol. Looking to the future, the Article discusses the possibility that agriculture and forestry can contribute to a broader "offset" program within a cap-and-trade regime, but notes how special-interest political forces have already begun to threaten this possibility by distorting, beyond what good science supports, provisions on agricultural offsets in the June 2009 Waxman-Markey climate-change bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Patent Law's Audience

Introduction 73 I. Designing Legal Rules in View of Audience Interests ....... 76 A. Proximity 77 B. Complexity 80 C. The Proximity/Complexity Tradeoff 82 II. Mapping The Modern Patent System: Audience and The Proximity/Complexity Tradeoff 84 A. Audience in the Early American Patent System 84 B. Audience in the Modern Patent System: Unfavorable Proximity for Complex Rules? 86 III. Redesigning Patent Law In View of Audience 89 A. The Proximity/Complexity Problem with Patent Scope Doctrines 90 1. Claim Construction: The PHOSITA as a Constructed Audience 93 2. Prosecution History Estoppel: The Appearance (and Disappearance) of the “Reasonable Competitor” as Audience 101 3. Disclosure-Dedication Rule and Other Specification-Based Doctrines of Surrender ......... 107 4. Patent Disclosure Rules 112 5. Audience and Freedom-to-Operate: The Example of Divided Infringement Claims 116
CORPORATE REPUTATION: A RESEARCH AGENDA USING STRATEGY AND STAKEHOLDER LITERATURE

This article explores three literature bases in some depth: strategy, stakeholder/ social issues, and the newly emergingworks in reputation. The focus is on the potential research and practical ove...
What Critiques of Sarbanes-Oxley Can Teach About Regulation of Nonprofit Governance

After a series of well-publicized corporate scandals, most notably Enron and WorldCom, President George W. Bush signed the American Competitiveness and Corporate Accountability Act of 2002, commonly known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), into law on July 30, 2002.1 It has been called “the most sweeping federal securities legislation since the original laws in 1933 and 1934.”2 Among SOX’s provisions are increased disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), establishment of a new oversight board for public accounting firms, limitation of non-audit services that can be provided by a firm’s auditors, required disclosure of internal controls, a prohibition on loans to insiders, a mandate that the audit committee consist solely of independent members, and certification by executives of financial reports.3 With the exception of the provisions related to document retention,4 Congress applied SOX only to publicly traded American companies.5 Nonetheless, invocation of SOX quickly reverberated across the nonprofit landscape. One after another, nonprofit advisors and trade groups urged voluntary compliance with the principles of SOX.6 Three examples give a sense of the broad and enthusiastic response. Independent Sector and BoardSource, in their 2003 pamphlet The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Implications for Nonprofit Organizations, called SOX “a wake-up call to the entire nonprofit community” and directed nonprofit leaders to “look
Epistemology, social technology, and expert judgement: Olaf Helmer's contribution to futures research

Abstract The article discusses Olaf Helmer's contribution to the development of futures studies by focusing on four basic theses defining his approach. (1) Quasi-laws in social sciences and futures studies can in fact be treated in the same way that the natural laws of the physical sciences. (2) In order to make predictions, one need not appeal to a strict logical derivation, as the “covering laws” doctrine of logical-empiricism suggests. (3) Prediction and explanation are not logically symmetrical as positivists believe, thus the conditions needed for explanation are not those required for prediction. (4) Local, tacit, personal and expert knowledge are crucial in developing a foresight methodology. In conjunction, these four theses open the way to a unique theory of social prediction and to variety of “unorthodox items of methodological equipment for the purposes of prediction in the inexact sciences.”
The New Forensics: Criminal Justice, False Certainty, and the Second Generation of Scientific Evidence

Accounts of powerful new forensic technologies such as DNA typing, biometric scanning, and cell site or RFID tracking fill the daily news. Such techniques have already gained renown for helping to exonerate those wrongly convicted, and for exposing the failings of a criminal justice system that too readily relied upon old forms of faulty forensic evidence like handwriting, ballistics, or even fingerprints. Advocates applaud the introduction of a "new paradigm" for forensic evidence, and promise that these new techniques will revolutionize the future investigation and trial of criminal cases. To be sure, these new forensic sciences offer an unprecedented degree of certainty and reliability. Yet that alone does not necessarily render them less susceptible to misuse by the criminal justice system. In fact, as this Article argues, the very characteristics most lauded in these new forensic techniques actually exacerbate the conditions that ultimately caused traditional forensic sciences to fall into disrepute. This Article challenges the new orthodoxy of forensic science. In so doing, it reframes the debate about forensic evidence in the criminal justice system in three respects. First, this Article sets forth a new taxonomy of forensic evidence, and distinguishes between first and second generation sciences by enumerating specific, classifiable characteristics. Second, using that framework, this Article illustrates how the pathologies of the criminal justice system that ultimately tarnished the first generation of forensic evidence are in fact aggravated, rather than relieved, by the particular characteristics of the second generation. Lastly, this Article criticizes current approaches to improving the use of forensic evidence in the criminal justice system for failing to account for the particular characteristics of second generation sciences, and instead advocates for changes tailored to those specific concerns.
How a Systems Perspective Improves Knowledge Acquisition and Performance in Analytical Procedures

ABSTRACT: Auditors are required to understand dynamic business environments as part of the performance of analytical procedures. Prior evidence, though, suggests that auditors have difficulty understanding such environments. This study reports an experimental investigation of techniques that help auditors to identify incorrect management representations by developing expectations that are both accurate and adaptive to changing business conditions. My predictions suggest that analyzing a dynamic client environment through a systems perspective enhances information-processing ability, which then improves both evidence discrimination and the assimilation of new audit evidence. Results reveal that participants taking a holistic systems-based view of a client environment develop more coherently organized mental models that increase their likelihood of identifying management representations that are inconsistent with industry evidence. Furthermore, these participants more efficiently use their information-proce...
Synthetic Hype: A Skeptical View of the Promise of Synthetic Biology

This article urges a cautious approach to assessing the promises of synthetic biology based on broad political and economic concerns rather than technical ones. Specifically, I mark three related dynamics which place the current buzz around synthetic biology in a broader context. These dynamics are not necessarily distinctive to synthetic biology, but perhaps for that very reason, they may carry added weight. First, is the place of synthetic biology as the latest entry in the procession of what I call the “receding horizons of biotechnological promise.” Second, is the excitement generated by the related promise of finding seemingly direct technological fixes for otherwise complex and messy social and political problems. Third, the resulting tendency to locate such technological fixes in the marketplace which then leads to a (re)allocation of scarce public goods toward market-oriented solutions to common problems that might be more appropriately and equitably addressed through public initiatives. This article, then, is less an examination of the promise and perils of synthetic biology per se and more of a cautionary examination of the challenges presented by the claims made on behalf of synthetic biology. It does not critique the technology as such, nor is it meant to be understood as science-bashing in any way. Rather, I aim to locate claims made on behalf of an emerging technology in their social and political context. Science is more than just theories and applications developed in the lab. It is also a social enterprise that makes demands on people and institutions outside the lab. In the regard, my basic concern here is to re-frame or move beyond existing debates over the ethical implication of synthetic biology for society in general, and consider more specifically, the ethical implications of the impact pursuing synthetic biology might have upon other technologies and policies meant to address similar problems.
On the Collective Magnetic Field Strength and Vector Structure of Dark Umbral Cores Measured by the Hinode Spectropolarimeter

We study 7530 sunspot umbrae and pores measured by the Hinode Spectropolarimeter (SP) between November 2006 and November 2012. We primarily seek confirmation of the long term secular decrease in the mean magnetic field strength of sunspot umbrae found by Penn and Livingston (IAU Symp. 273, 126, 2011) between 1998 and 2011. The excellent SP photometric properties and full vector magnetic field determinations from full-Stokes Milne–Eddington inversions are used to address the interrelated properties of the magnetic field strength and brightness temperature for all umbral cores. We find non-linear relationships between magnetic field strength and umbral temperature (and continuum contrast), as well as between umbral radius and magnetic field strength. Using disambiguated vector data, we find that the azimuths measured in the umbral cores reflect an organization weakly influenced by Joy’s law. The large selection of umbrae displays a log-normal size spectrum similar to earlier solar cycles. Influenced by the amplitude of the solar cycle and the non-linear relationship between umbral size and core magnetic field strength, the distribution of core magnetic field strengths, fit most effectively with a skew-normal distribution, shows a weak solar cycle dependence. Yet, the mean magnetic field strength does not show a significant long term trend.
The Jury and Popular Culture

This article review depictions of the jury in popular culture, including the play and film, Twelve Angry Men, the movie, Erin Brockovich, the novel, The Runaway Jury, by John Grisham, and the book and film, A Civil Action. Three paradigms appear in popular images of the jury: a populist account of the jury as outsider; a Hamiltonian account of the jury as enemy of business, and a Wilsonian account of the jury as under elite control.
Performance Regimes Amidst Governance Complexity

Much of the appeal of performance measurement is explained by its image as a simple and value-neutral way to monitor and improve government. But contemporary governance is characterized by complexity. Few public officials have the luxury of directly providing relatively simple services, the context in which performance regimes work best. Instead, they must work in the context of a disarticulated state, with policy problems that cross national boundaries and demand a multi-actor response. At the same time, traditional democratic values must be honored. This article examines the tensions between performance regimes and the complexity of modern governance, identifying implications and questions for research and practice.
Cross-validated SNP density estimates

Abstract We consider cross-validation strategies for the seminonparametric (SNP) density estimator, which is a truncation (or sieve) estimator based upon a Hermite series expansion with coefficients determined by quasi-maximum likelihood. Our main focus is on the use of SNP density estimators as an adjunct to efficient method of moments (EMM) structural estimation. It is known that for this purpose a desirable truncation point occurs at the last point at which the integrated squared error (ISE) curve of the SNP density estimate declines abruptly. We study the determination of the ISE curve for iid data by means of leave-one-out cross-validation and hold-out-sample cross-validation through an examination of their performance over the Marron–Wand test suite and models related to asset pricing and auction applications. We find that both methods are informative as to the location of abrupt drops, but that neither can reliably determine the minimum of the ISE curve. We validate these findings with a Monte Carlo study. The hold-out-sample method is cheaper to compute because it requires fewer nonlinear optimizations. We consider the asymptotic justification of hold-out-sample cross-validation. For this purpose, we establish rates of convergence of the SNP estimator under the Hellinger norm that are of interest in their own right.
Fiscal Consequences of Paying Interest on Reserves

We review the role of the central bank's balance sheet in a textbook monetary model and explore what changes if the central bank is allowed to pay interest on its liabilities. When the central bank (CB) cannot pay interest, away from the zero lower bound its (real) balance sheet is limited by the demand for money. Furthermore, if securities are not marked to market and the central bank holds its bonds to maturity, it is impossible for the CB to make losses, and it always obtains profits from being a monopoly provider of money. When the option of paying interest on liabilities is allowed, the limit on the CB's balance sheet is lifted. In this case, the CB is free to take on interest-rate risk – for example, by buying long-term securities and financing those purchases with short-term debt that pays the market interest rate. This is a risky enterprise that can lead to additional profits but also to losses. To the extent that losses exceed the profits of the monopoly operations, the CB faces two options: either it is recapitalised by Treasury or it increases its monopoly profits by raising the inflation tax.
Deliberating Groups versus Prediction Markets (or Hayek's Challenge to Habermas)

For multiple reasons, deliberating groups often converge on falsehood rather than truth. Individual errors may be amplified rather than cured. Group members may fall victim to a bad cascade, either informational or reputational. Deliberators may emphasize shared information at the expense of uniquely held information. Finally, group polarization may lead even rational people to unjustified extremism. By contrast, prediction markets often produce accurate results, because they create strong incentives for revelation of privately held knowledge and succeed in aggregating widely dispersed information. The success of prediction markets offers a set of lessons for increasing the likelihood that groups can obtain the information that their members have.
Who Ran on Repo

The sale and repurchase (repo) market played a central role in the recent financial crisis. From the second quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2009, net repo financing provided to U.S. banks and broker-dealers fell by about $1.3 trillion ‐ more than half of its precrisis total. Significant details of this “run on repo” remain shrouded, however, because many of the providers of repo finance are lightly regulated or unregulated cash pools. In this paper we supplement the best available official data sources with a unique market survey to provide an updated picture of the dynamics of the repo run. We provide evidence that the run was predominantly driven by the flight of foreign financial institutions, domestic and offshore hedge funds, and other unregulated cash pools. Our analysis highlights the danger of relying exclusively on data from regulated institutions, which would miss the most important parts of the run.
Size and Value Anomalies under Regime Shifts

This paper finds strong evidence of time-variations in the joint distribution of returns on a stock market portfolio and portfolios tracking size- and value effects. Mean returns, volatilities and correlations between these equity portfolios are found to be driven by underlying regimes that introduce short-run market timing opportunities for investors. The magnitude of the premia on the size and value portfolios and their hedging properties are found to vary across regimes. Regimes are shown to have a large impact both on the optimal asset allocation--especially under rebalancing--and on investors' utility. Regimes also have a considerable impact on hedging demands, which are positive when the investor starts from more favorable regimes and negative when starting from bad states. Recursive out-of-sample forecasting experiments show that portfolio strategies based on models that account for regimes dominate single-state benchmarks. Copyright The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
The Behavior of Interest Rates

The evidence in Fama and Bliss (1987) that forward interest rates forecast future spot interest rates for horizons beyond a year repeats in the out-of-sample 1986--2004 period. But the inference that this forecast power is due to mean reversion of the spot rate toward a constant expected value no longer seems valid. Instead, the predictability of the spot rate captured by forward rates seems to be due to mean reversion toward a time-varying expected value that is subject to a sequence of apparently permanent shocks that are on balance positive to mid-1981 and on balance negative thereafter. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
Ethics in International Arbitration: Traps for the Unwary

Attorneys in the U.S. who are new to international arbitration may be unaware of how ethical rules in foreign jurisdictions affect their conduct. It may not be easy to ascertain what ethical rules govern in a proceeding, or what happens if there are conflicting ethical rules. Because of the many areas where different legal and cultural backgrounds may cause clashes in ethical rules, attorneys need to take steps to ensure that they are familiar with their obligations in any new setting. If they have doubts about those obligations, they should at the very least seek clarification from the arbitral tribunal. Because ethical rules are so different, if attorneys from different jurisdictions were to each act only in accordance with their local rules, those rules might provide an advantage or a disadvantage to one side. In addition, attorneys who act only in accord with the rules of the jurisdiction where they were licensed risk violating the rules of the place of arbitration. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are urging that a uniform international code of ethics be developed to govern conduct for attorneys engaged in international arbitration. Efforts have begun to create such codes, and to suggest how the codes could be enforced. An internationally accepted code could provide more confidence to participating attorneys that they are conducting themselves ethically in accordance with governing rules, and would also contribute to the transparency and the fairness of the process.
Mancession or "Momcession"?: Good Providers, a Bad Economy, and Gender Discrimination

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic downturn, some of the industries that were the hardest hit were manufacturing and construction. As a result, men became unemployed at a higher rate than women and, consequently, women – for the first time ever – became over fifty percent of the employment market. This “mancession” gave rise to great debate over the place of women in the workforce and the important role that employment plays in shaping male identity. An intervening critique came in the form of the “momcession” discourse that focused on the impact of the recession on mothers, who were often responsible for caretaking, homemaking, and providing the primary income for the family. This Article explores the interplay between "mancession" and "momcession," and what each discourse expresses about the right to employment, workplace privilege, and discrimination against caregivers. The bad economy brought into sharp focus the flaws and fallacies of the masculine good provider stereotype while simultaneously creating hurdles for reconciling the good provider stereotype with the prescriptively normative model of caretaking.The Article subsequently investigates claims of caretaker discrimination, brought by both men and women, and proposes the strategic use of Title VII gender stereotyping claims as a means of reconstructing the gender norms that keep both men and women from being full participants within the workplace and household.
Building a Better Bar Exam

In the wake of declining bar passage rates and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, 36 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted the UBE. I predict that in a few years the UBE will be administered in all states and U.S. territories. The UBE has snowballed from an idea into the primary gateway for entry into the practice of law. But the UBE is not a panacea that will solve the bar passage problems that U.S. law schools face. Whether or not to adopt a uniform exam is no longer the question. Now that the UBE has firmly taken root, the question to be answered is what can be done to make sure that the UBE does less harm than good? This paper will, in four parts, examine the meteoric rise and spread of the UBE and the potential costs of its quick adoption. Part one will survey the gradual move away from state law exams to the jurisdictionally neutral UBE. Part two will identify correlations between recent changes to the multistate exams and a stark national decline in bar passage rates. Part three will address the limitations of the UBE, including the misleading promise of score portability and the consequences of forum shopping. Part four will propose additional measures that can coexist with the UBE to counterbalance its limitations to make a better bar exam for our students and the clients they will serve.
What's all that (strategic) noise? anticipatory impression management in CEO succession

We develop and test a novel theory about strategic noise with regard to CEO appointments. Strategic noise is an anticipatory and preemptive form of impression management. At the time it announces a new CEO, a board of directors seeks to manage stakeholder impressions by simultaneously releasing confounding information about other significant events. Several CEO and firm characteristics affect the likelihood that this will happen. Strategic noise is most likely when long-term CEOs have a wide pay gap between other top managers at high stock price performance firms, and when a new CEO does not have previous CEO experience or comes from a less well-regarded firm. Results showing that CEO succession announcements are noisier than they would be by chance have some interesting implications for impression management theory, traditional event study methodology, and managerial and public policy. Interviews with public firm directors on CEO succession provide additional validity for the strategic noise construct and help us to articulate key elements of the theory. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
An analysis of Hong Kong export performance

The article examines the Hong Kong export performance. A standard export demand formulation is used as the benchmark. Then, we investigate the effects of real exchange rate volatility, “third” country competition, domestic wages, and costs of imports from China on export volume. The study models the Hong Kong domestic exports and re-exports separately, compares the performance of exports to the rest of the world, US and Japan, and uses destination-and-export-type specific unit value indexes to construct real exchange rates. It is found that Hong Kong export performance varies across export types and across destinations. In general, Hong Kong exports display mean-reverting dynamics, are positively influenced by foreign income, and are adversely affected by high value of its currency. The lagged export variable, foreign income, and real exchange rate provide most of the explanatory power. The other variables contribute only marginally in explaining the variability of Hong Kong exports.
Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision: An Enforceable International Financial Standard?

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision serves as an international forum to discuss international bank supervision issues. Because of the gravity and frequency of banking crises since the demise of the Bretton Woods System in the early 1970s, international financial standards have emerged as a method to minimize these crises. In 1998, the Basel Committee issued a comprehensive standard on bank super vision that built upon its work over the previous two and a half decades. In this Article, the author analyzes this comprehensive standard-the Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision-and assesses its implementation in the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and the Hong Kong SAR. The author then analyzes the options available to enforce this "soft law" and comments on the effec tiveness of these options, including the surveillance programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and certain provisions of the Revised Capital Accord of 2004. Despite the improvements repre sented by the Core Principles, the author suggests future changes in the international bank supervisory regime.
Government Involvement in Corporate Debt Restructuring: Case Studies from the Great Recession

The paper examines recent episodes of government involvement in corporate debt restructurings. It argues that corporate debt restructuring is an important step toward recovery from a financial crisis. Due to interlinkages between the balance sheets of corporations and the financial sector, without an effective corporate debt restructuring, bank lending is likely to remain constrained. We then discuss the rationale for, and modalities of, the state intervention in corporate debt workouts through reviewing six countries with large scale corporate debt workouts. Case studies reveal that the costs of corporate sector rescue are significant and in several cases on par with the costs of financial sector support. The paper sheds light on the importance of contingent liabilities and associated risks to government balance sheet from the corporate debt side and draws conclusions that point to the need for improved surveillance and governance going forward.
Recent immigrants as labor market arbitrageurs: Evidence from the minimum wage ☆

This paper investigates the local labor supply effects of changes to the minimum wage by examining the response of low-skilled immigrants’ location decisions. Canonical models emphasize the importance of labor mobility when evaluating the employment effects of the minimum wage; yet few studies address this outcome directly. Low-skilled immigrant populations shift toward labor markets with stagnant minimum wages, and this result is robust to a number of alternative interpretations. This mobility provides behavior-based evidence in favor of a non-trivial negative employment effect of the minimum wage. Further, it reduces the estimated demand elasticity using teens; employment losses among native teens are substantially larger in states that have historically attracted few immigrant residents.
Legislating Incentives for Attorney Representation in Civil Rights Litigation

AbstractCongress routinely relies on private lawsuits to enforce its mandates. In this article, we investigate whether, when it does so, the details of the legislation can importantly influence the extent to which the private bar is mobilized to carry out the prosecutorial function. Using an original and novel data set based on review of archived litigation documents for cases filed in the Northern and Eastern Districts of California over the two decades spanning 1981–2000, we examine the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which increased economic damages available to Title VII job discrimination plaintiffs, on their ability to secure counsel. We find that over the course of the decade after passage, the law substantially increased the probability that Title VII plaintiffs would be represented by counsel and that in doing so it reversed a decade-long trend in the opposite direction.
Secrecy and Safety

We provide a model showing that the use of confidential settlement as a strategy for a firm facing tort litigation leads to lower average safety of products sold than would occur if the firm were committed to openness. A rational risk-neutral consumer's response in a market, wherein a firm engages in confidential settlements, may be to reduce demand. A firm committed to openness incurs higher liability and R&D costs, though product demand is not diminished. We identify conditions such that, if the cost of credible auditing (to verify openness) is low enough, a firm prefers to eschew confidentiality.
Promotion, Relative Performance Information, and the Peter Principle

ABSTRACT: I examine the effects of providing workers with relative performance information (RPI) on employers' promotion decisions and the impact of those decisions on worker performance. In my experimental setting, the job after promotion requires higher-level abilities than the current job. I find that workers increase their effort to improve their current job performance after a promotion opportunity is announced because they expect this to increase their chances of promotion, even though the new task requires higher-level abilities. Moreover, because employers anticipate that workers who have RPI will react negatively if they see that the best current job performer is not promoted, employers promote the best current job performer, rather than the worker best suited for the next job, more often when workers have RPI than when they do not. Consistent with the Peter Principle, I find that when workers have RPI, the promoted worker's performance is lower after promotion because the promoted worker lacks t...
Tax and Expenditure Limitations and State and Local Fiscal Structure: An Empirical Assessment

The tax and expenditure limitation (TEL) “movement” of the 1970s and 1980s can be characterized in part as a struggle between local autonomy and state control. Undeniable shifts have occurred over the same period in state and local revenue systems and functional responsibilities. This article places these shifts within the context of this movement, using pooled, cross-sectional, time-series techniques for the period between 1970 and 1990, in an effort to assess its impacts. Findings suggest that TELs have resulted in increased centralization, lessened local responsiveness, increased use of local non-tax sources of revenue, and a sector less accommodating to the needs of dependent populations. TELs may have also had dubious effects on both the allocative efficiency and equity of the state and local public sector.
Leading through crisis: Applied neuroscience and mindsight

Are neuroscientific principles relevant in efforts to manage change successfully? This article provides a case that demonstrates how persistent and purposeful attentional focus, as described by neuroscience, can help overcome human resistance to change and generate creative and successful solutions. A change management perspective growing out of fresh neurological insights into human behavior is also discussed.
SEC enforcement: Does forthright disclosure and cooperation really matter?

Abstract This study examines the conditions under which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exercises enforcement leniency following a restatement. I explore whether cooperation with SEC staff and forthright disclosure of a restatement (e.g., disclosures reported in a timely and visible manner) reduce the likelihood of an SEC sanction or SEC monetary penalties. After controlling for restatement severity, I find that cooperation increases the likelihood of being sanctioned, perhaps because it improves the SEC's ability to build a successful case against the firm. However, cooperation and forthright disclosures are rewarded by the SEC through lower monetary penalties.
New Medium, Old Free Speech Regimes: The Historical and Ideological Foundations of French & American Regulation of Bias-Motivated Speech and Symbolic Expression on the Internet

This article analyzed how the United States and France regulate bias-motivated communication or hate speech on the Internet. Communication that is characterized by vitriolic expressions of hatred towards individuals or groups on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation is permissible in the United States because the country has an individualistic, libertarian worldview in which freedom of speech takes pride of place. Under the First Amendment, the rights of the speaker take precedence over the feelings of the listener. In contrast, France has a communitarian, moral philosophical system in which civility and equality take precedence over individual speech rights. These contrasting perspective were evident in the Yahoo! cases that were heard by courts in both countries.
Interrupted Consumption: Disrupting Adaptation to Hedonic Experiences:

Abstract Six studies demonstrate that interrupting a consumption experience can make pleasant experiences more enjoyable and unpleasant experiences more irritating, even though consumers avoid breaks in pleasant experiences and choose breaks in unpleasant experiences. Across a variety of hedonic experiences (e.g., listening to noises or songs, sitting in a massage chair), the authors observe that breaks disrupt hedonic adaptation and, as a result, intensify the subsequent experience.
Sex Differences in the Acceptability of Discrimination

A large telephone survey conducted after the attacks of September 11, 2001, suggests that the willingness to tolerate discrimination varies significantly across domains, with a very high tolerance of discrimination against poorly educated immigrants and a strikingly low tolerance of discrimination against the genetically disadvantaged. Regardless of domain, tolerance is greater among men than among women. A survey conducted simultaneously over the World Wide Web, using volunteer panels, replicated the phone survey results and revealed an even larger sex gap. This finding suggests that a social desirability bias leads women to overstate and men to understate their tolerance of discrimination in public.
Economics and language

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory. As a postscript two economists, Tilman Borgers (University College London) and Bart Lipman (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and a logician, Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information) offer comments.
Opportunities Knocking: Residual Income Valuation of an Adaptive Firm

Maintaining a competitive edge requires a firm to replace deteriorating business lines with new projects. Accordingly, part of a firm's value resides in its ability to exploit new opportunities. This paper incorporates adaptation into Ohlson's residual income valuation framework and obtains an adaptation-adjusted valuation formula. Although parsimoniously cast, the model makes two predictions that are consistent with phenomena reported in the empirical literature: earnings convexity and complementarity. Moreover, the Appendix introduces an Equivalence Theorem relating Modigliani-Miller dividend invariance, complementarity, and convexity.
The Fourth Amendment and Surveillance in a Digital World

Technology has transformed government surveillance and opened traditionally private information to official scrutiny. The current privacy-based approach to the Fourth Amendment is unable to cope with the changes. This Article offers a solution to the problems that technological surveillance techniques present. Starting with the introduction of the approach in Katz, the Article reviews the development of the privacy-based approach. It then looks at three 21st century Supreme Court cases that grappled with applying the Katz test to advanced technological surveillance techniques: Kyllo, Quon, and Jones. These cases demonstrate the problems that the privacy-based approach creates and the need for an alternative.Rather than trying to repair the privacy-based approach’s short-comings, this Article recommends adopting a new approach - one that returns to the amendment’s text, interpreting "searches" to include all investigative techniques aimed at gathering information, thus subjecting all governmental surveillance to the amendment’s reasonableness mandate. The Fourth Amendment would have a broadened reach and its protections would no longer hinge on whether personal information might somehow be public, not private. After explaining how the new approach might function, the Article offers some tentative thoughts, as well as cautions, concerning the impact of a Fourth Amendment expansion on the presumption that to be reasonable, a search must be supported by a warrant.
Unemployment Expectations and the Business Cycle

I compare unemployment expectations from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to VAR forecastable movements in unemployment. I document three key facts. First, onehalf to one-third of the population expects unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession even though the VAR is able to predict the fall in unemployment. Second, more people expect unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession than expect it to rise when it is rising at the beginning of a recession even though these movements are predictable with the VAR. Finally, the lag change in unemployment is as important as the VAR prediction of the future unemployment change in predicting the fraction of the population that expects unemployment to rise. Least squares learning or real time expectations do little to help explain these facts. However, delayed updating of expectations can addresses some of these puzzles and extrapolative expectations addresses these puzzles the best. Individuals with higher income or education are only slightly less likely to make these expectational errors and those who makes these errors are 8-10 percent less likely to believe it is a good time to make a major purchase.