cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Presidential Appointments to the Supreme Court: Adding Systematic Explanation to Probabilistic Description

Three articles, published in the leading journals of three disciplines over the last five decades, have each used the Poisson probability distribution to help describe the frequency with which presidents were able to appoint United States Supreme Court Justices. This work challenges these previous findings with a new model of Court appointments. The analysis demonstrates that the number of appointments a president can expect to make in a given year is a function of existing measurable variables.
Formal semantics for time in databases

The concept of a historical database is introduced as a tool for modeling the dynamic nature of some part of the real world. Just as first-order logic has been shown to be a useful formalism for expressing and understanding the underlying semantics of the relational database model, intensional logic is presented as an analogous formalism for expressing and understanding the temporal semantics involved in a historical database. The various components of the relational model, as extended to include historical relations, are discussed in terms of the model theory for the logic ILs, a variation of the logic IL formulated by Richard Montague. The modal concepts of intensional and extensional data constraints and queries are introduced and contrasted. Finally, the potential application of these ideas to the problem of natural language database querying is discussed.
International fuel tax assessment: an application to Chile

Gasoline and diesel fuel are heavily taxed in many developed and some emerging and developing countries. Outside the United States and Europe, however, there has been little attempt to quantify the external costs of vehicle use, so policy makers lack guidance on whether prevailing tax rates are economically efficient. This paper develops a general approach for estimating motor vehicle externalities, and hence corrective taxes on gasoline and diesel, based on pooling local data with extrapolations from US evidence. The analysis is illustrated for the case of Chile, although it could be applied to other countries.
Prior Client Performance and the Choice of Investment Bank Advisors in Corporate Acquisitions

Contrary to earlier studies, we find that prior client performance is a significant determinant of the likelihood that an investment bank will be chosen as the advisor by future acquirers and of the changes through time in banks' shares of the advisory business. Further, the changes in the market values of acquirers at the announcement of acquisition attempts are positively correlated with contemporaneous changes in the market values of their advisors. Two implications arise: (1) acquirers consider advisors' prior client performance when choosing their advisors and (2) market forces work to align advisors' and clients' interests in the acquisition market.
Hard-to-Value Stocks, Behavioral Biases, and Informed Trading

This paper uses investor-level data to provide direct evidence for an intuitive but surprisingly untested proposition that investors make larger investment mistakes when valuation uncertainty is higher and stocks are more difficult to value. Using multiple measures of valuation uncertainty and multiple behavioral bias proxies, I show that individual investors exhibit stronger behavioral biases when stocks are harder to value and when market-level uncertainty is higher. I also find that informed trading intensity is higher among stocks where individual investors exhibit stronger behavioral biases.. Collectively, these results indicate that uncertainty at both stock and market levels amplifies individual investors' behavioral biases and that relatively better informed investors attempt to exploit those biases.
Religious Law, Family Law and Arbitration: Shari'a and Halakha in America

The possibility that Muslims might use private arbitration as a forum in which their family law disputes could be settled according to the principles of Islamic law has generated substantial controversy, with one liberal democracy, Canada, even taking affirmative steps to insure that religious-based arbitration of family law disputes are denied legal recognition. This paper argues that such moves are ill-considered. From the perspective of political liberalism, the arbitration of family law disputes within a framework of religious law, provided that the arbitration is subject to review by a public court for conformity with public policy, is an ideal tool for deepening and broadening liberal political values such as religious freedom and gender equality within an overall recognition of the legitimacy of a limited amount of pluralism in family life.
The entrepreneur's idea and outside finance: Theory and evidence about entrepreneurial roles

Abstract We study the problem faced by the entrepreneur seeking outside support to turn an entrepreneurial idea into a successful innovation—specifically a successful technological innovation resulting from research and development. The paper develops and tests the hypothesis that as an entrepreneur's innovative idea becomes more complex, the entrepreneur will find it more difficult to obtain outside finance and then outside support more generally for the commercialization of the idea. Consequently, the entrepreneur will be more likely to take on additional roles beyond providing the essential idea. The evidence supports the hypothesis that, other things being the same, an entrepreneur with a more complex idea will have greater difficulty obtaining outside finance and will be more likely to take on the additional roles of development, production, marketing and distribution that are necessary for successful innovation.
AI4D: Artificial Intelligence for Development

We derive a conceptual bridge between technical concepts from the deep learning literature and natural metaphors for international development. We start with a rather technical review of four of the characteristic traits of deep learning technologies: representation, reuse, robustness, regularization (4Rs of deep learning). Based on the empirical evidence of 24 case studies, we derive four characteristics of the use of AI4D that align with the four technological traits, namely development foci on local and distance intelligence, and mirrored and detailed reality representations. In isolation, each one of the identified issues presents a plethora of opportunities to contribute to international development, especially to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, in combination, they create a clear tension between a looming threat of a hegemonic intelligence indoctrination pushed by global economies of scale and the potential promise to not only honor but also celebrate local diversity with the help of flexible AI designs.
The Generational Divide in Support for Environmental Policies: European Evidence

This article examines age variations in support for environmental protection policies that affect climate change using a sample of over 14,000 respondents to a 1999 Eurobarometer survey. There is a steady decline with age in whether respondents are willing to incur higher gasoline prices to protect the environment. This relationship remains after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics. There are age-related differences in information about environmental risks, information sources about the environment, perceived health risks from climate change, and degree of worry about climate change. However, taking these factors into account does not eliminate the age variation in willingness to pay more for gasoline to protect the environment.
History, memory, and conflict resolution: Research and application

This article is the second of a two-part series and presents empirical research into the study of history, memory, and long-term intractable conflict. Interviews with members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities serve as the basis for this research. A variety of constructs emerged that inform conflict resolution practice, including a strong orientation to the past and its link to identity, emotion, and how past beliefs inform present perceptions. Recommendations are offered for how to integrate historical matter more fully into practice.
A Common Law Perspective on the Supreme Court and its Functions

The University of Warsaw is to be commended for focusing attention on the role of a supreme court, for that can be a critical component of a court system and, more generally, critical also to the fair functioning of a democratic government (and to others, no doubt). It makes sense to start out such a conference considering the roles a Supreme Court can play in a judicial system, and also to approach that question with an eye to the somewhat divergent attitudes toward the judicial role of common law and civil law systems. Those differences may mean a lot for the role of such a court and for the organization of the Court, a topic to be taken up by the next panel. I hope I will not trespass too much on topics to be addressed by others in my presentation. I will argue that questions of design and function – while important – probably are not more important than more elusive questions about institutional status and evolution, something one could refer to as “legal culture.” So we must approach our analysis with considerable humility. Particularly here in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, where constitutional and democratic institutions have taken root over the last quarter century, it is important to appreciate the permutations of that sort of development. I am here as the representative of the common law approach to the function of a Supreme Court, and will begin by cautioning that in some ways the common law v. civil divide is not entirely informative in regard to procedure, but that it is highly important in terms of the role of judges in “declaring” law. I will also speak mainly about the Supreme Court of my country, for it is a distinctive institution. That said, the US situation offers an example of functions a court may have that differs from the function of courts in many other judicial systems, and those differences can importantly be said to relate to its role in a common law system. At the same time, I will regard such questions as whether the Supreme Court should have the power of judicial review of legislation as somewhat background. In the US, as is well known, we have had such review since Marbury v. Madison, but that 1803 decision did not immediately place a stamp on our Court that remained unchanged for the ensuing 200 years.
The (Non)Performance Of Kiplinger"s Expert Recommendations

We examine the performance of 1,572 stock recommendations published over the past 10 years by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine. Kiplinger’s picks earned a risk-adjusted mean abnormal monthly return of -2.58% over the 6-month post-pick period. Our analysis indicates that the recommended firms were larger than average, and that the non-risk-adjusted returns of these stocks exceeded market returns prior to being selected. The poor post-pick performance cannot be attributed to a small subset of stocks or to a particular time frame. Instead, the experts appear to significantly underperform throughout much of the period examined. Our findings suggest that the experts of some popular investment periodicals may bias their analyses in favor of hot stocks to appeal to the interests of naive subscribers.
Creditors Versus Capital Formation: The Case Against the European Legal Capital Rules

This article presents a critical economic analysis of the European Union's legal capital rules as codified by the Second Directive. Professors Enriques and Macey explore the fundamental differences between United States and European Union approaches to the conflict between fixed and equity claimants and argue that the European Union should abandon its inefficient approach. The costs associated with the European legal capital rules - particularly costs to shareholders, creditors, and society as a whole - significantly outweigh any benefits accrued by creditors. The authors suggest that a public-choice theory best explains the existence of the European legal capital rules, in that certain influential interest groups benefit from the rules despite their inefficiency. In conclusion, this Article advocates that the European Union should abandon its current legal capital rules in favor of more flexible, contractarian rules in order to facilitate entrepreneurship and business development in European markets.
A Probability Model for Earnings Restatement

Given their prevalence in recent years, earnings management and financial restatements have been at the center of much of the discussion surrounding corporate malfeasance. This study builds a probability model for predicting the likelihood of earnings restatements by analyzing the trends in and the deviations from the industry averages of the return on assets, accounts receivable turnover, net profit margin, and operating cash flow to net income measures. Data are obtained for a sample of 104 firms (restating as well as non-restating) for the 2000 to 2001 period. The results suggest that deviations from the industry average of the accounts receivable turnover and the variability in the cash flow to net income provide good barometers for detecting fraudulent accounting. Potential restating firms have higher accounts receivable turnover rates than their industry counterparts and downward trends in their cash flow to net income, so an increase (decrease) in the accounts receivable turnover (operating cash flow to net income) significantly increases the likelihood of a restatement, at least in the current study.
The Lawyer Is Not the Protagonist: Community Campaigns, Law, and Social Change

In the conventional narrative about the role of law in social change, lawyers are the protagonists. A social problem exists and a group or individual calls on a lawyer to do something about it. The lawyer explores various possibilities, decides on a course of action together with her client, and proceeds. The legal strategy either wins, in which case the story is a successful one, or loses, in which case it failed. In this concluding essay to the California Law Review's symposium volume on Race, Economic Justice and Community Lawyering, I offer an alternative narrative, reflecting on the symposium's articles, which describe a series of recent campaigns for racial and economic justice undertaken by community organizations and coalitions. In these campaigns, attorneys appear as supporting players rather than main characters, seeking to help organizations build the capacity and the power to make change. Such lawyers draw their strategies from the usual legal toolbag: education about rights, litigation, engagement with regulatory processes involving various federal, state, and municipal agencies and entities, transactional and legislative work. But their core questions are different ones. They are not asking what legal levers can fix this problem, but how can legal levers put the group in a position to achieve its goals? Taken together, I argue, these stories suggest a promising vision for the role of lawyers in today's community-based battles for justice.
An Essay on Torts: States of Argument

This essay summarizes high points in torts scholarship and case law over a period of two generations, highlighting the “states of argument” that have characterized tort law over that period. It intertwines doctrine and policy. Its doctrinal features include the traditional spectrum of tort liability, the duty question, problems of proof, and the relative incoherency of damages rules. Noting the cross-doctrinal role of tort as a solver of functional problems, it focuses on major issues in products liability and medical malpractice. The essay discusses such elements of policy as the role of power in tort law, the tension between communitarianism and individualism, and the inherent limits of private law. It offers both comparisons and contrasts from the most wrenchingly generated non-tort compensation system, the September 11th Fund. Finally raising the question of the extent to which courts judging difficult tort cases can truly be dispassionate, it suggests that the state of tort law remains one of argument, constantly requiring judgment.
Armed conflict, household victimization, and child health in Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract We examine the causal impact of the 2002–2007 civil conflict in Cote d'Ivoire on children's health using household surveys collected before, during, and after the conflict, and information on the exact location and date of conflict events. Our identification strategy relies on exploiting both temporal and spatial variation across birth cohorts to measure children's exposure to the conflict. We find that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions. We further examine possible war impact mechanisms using rich survey data on households' experience of war. Our results suggest that conflict-related household victimization, and in particular economic losses, is an important channel through which armed conflict negatively impacts child health.
WHY IRA AND KEOGH PLANS SHOULD AVOID GROWTH STOCKS

This paper explores the effect of taxing personal income from common stocks on the return of equity portfolios held by mutual funds under IRA or Keogh plans. The expected rate of return earned by a tax-sheltered fund on any given stock is inversely related to the stock's pershare growth rate. The explanation for this effect does not rely on the standard assumption that growth decreases the effective rate of taxation. Rather, this effect holds despite heavier taxation of growth stocks because of the incomplete manner in which the return is sheltered. The implication of this finding for the optimal portfolio selection policy of tax-sheltered equity funds is inconsistent with evidence showing that such funds tend to concentrate in growth stocks. A second issue examined is the use of IRA and Keogh plans as a temporary tax shelter. Under the present 10-percent penalty on premature distribution, the critical investment period may be as short as two to three years. This finding indicates the usefulness of these plans as a general investment tool.
Grant Levels and Debt Issuance: Is There a Relationship? Is There Symmetry?

Although previous work on fiscal federalism and grants has focused on the effects of grants on expenditures, no published research examines the impact of decreasing grants on state financing. This research addresses how decreasing levels of federal grant money to states affect states' long-term debt issuance, and whether the relationship is symmetric for increasing and decreasing grants. The model is tested with time series, cross-sectional data from 1984 to 1999. The results show that grants affect debt issuance, the effect is asymmetric, and direction of the effect differs for different types of debt issuance.
Is Originalism Our Law

This Essay provides a new framework for criticizing originalism or its alternatives – the framework of positive law. Existing debates are either conceptual or normative: They focus either on the nature of interpretation and authority, or on originalism’s ability to serve other values, like predictability, democracy, or general welfare. Both sets of debates are stalled. Instead, we ought to ask: Is originalism our law? If not, what is? Answering this question can reorient the debates and allow both sides to move forward. If we apply this positivist framework, there is a surprisingly strong case that our current constitutional law is originalism. First, I argue that originalism can and should be understood inclusively. That is, it permits doctrine like precedent if those doctrines can be justified on originalist grounds. Second, I argue that our current constitutional practices demonstrate a commitment to inclusive originalism. In Supreme Court cases where originalism conflicts with other methods of interpretation, the Court picks originalism. By contrast, none of the Court’s putatively antioriginalist cases in fact repudiate originalist reasoning. These judicial practices are reinforced by a broader convention of treating the constitutional text as law and its origin as the framing. So while constitutional practice might seem, on the surface, to be a pluralism of competing theories, its deep structure is in fact a nuanced form of originalism. Third, I suggest that originalism’s positive legal status has important normative implications for today’s judges. Judges promise to follow the law, and their judicial authority is premised on the assumption that they do. So if an inclusive version of originalism is the law, judges ought not be the ones to change it. Courts ought to privilege our current legal conventions over academic theories that are anti-originalist and against narrower forms of originalism as well.
De Gustibus non est Taxandum: Heterogeneity in Preferences and Optimal Redistribution

Abstract The prominent but unproven intuition that preference heterogeneity reduces redistribution in a standard optimal tax model is shown to hold under the plausible condition that the distribution of preferences for consumption relative to leisure rises, in terms of first-order stochastic dominance, with income. Given familiar functional form assumptions on utility and the distributions of ability and preferences, a simple statistic for the effect of preference heterogeneity on marginal tax rates is derived. Numerical simulations and suggestive empirical evidence demonstrate the link between this potentially measurable statistic and the quantitative implications of preference heterogeneity for policy.
Dealing with Uncertain Budget Forecasts

The article reviews the history of past budget projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The projections have been extremely inaccurate because of errors in the choice of economic and technical assumptions. The errors grow rapidly as the projection’s period is lengthened. The projections are unlikely to get better soon. Therefore, the question becomes how CBO, the Congress, and the media should react to the extraordinary uncertainty that must be attached to the budget outlook. Among other things, the author suggests de-emphasizing projections made for periods longer than five years, because such projections are only a little better than random noise. He also points out the futility of aiming for rigorously enforced numerical targets for the budget balance, as was done in Gramm-Rudman and as has been proposed in various types of “lock box” legislation. The targets move around too rapidly to ever be hit.
"Rent Seeking: Valuing Tullock's Rejects"

This paper demonstrates that Gordon Tullock's articles on rent seeking continue to be cited, often far more frequently than the papers which journals chose to publish when they rejected Tullock's submissions.
Independent directors' dissent on boards: Evidence from listed companies in China

Research summary: Although opinion conformity is believed to be commonly used by corporate elites to invoke reciprocity, it is hard to study in the context of corporate boards since boards are typically “black boxes.” Focusing on publicly traded companies in China, where disclosure of dissent is mandated, we show that dissent is associated with a breakdown of the social exchange relationship within boards. Specifically, dissent is more likely to occur when the board chair who appointed the independent director has left the board, or when the board “game” is reaching its last round, defined as a 60-day window before departure of the board chair or the director herself. Our findings lend considerable support to conceptualization of boards as a social exchange device. Managerial summary: With a novel dataset from China we ask the question of whether the social norm of reciprocity compromises independent directors' decisions. Our results lend considerable support to the hypothesis that independent directors would generally defer to top management as they feel indebted for being offered a director position and in exchange independent directors provide support. We identified two instances in which independent directors are more likely to dissent due to a breakdown of social exchange relationships: (1) when the board chair who appointed the independent director has left the board, and (2) when the board “game” was reaching its last round, that is, either the board chair or the director herself is leaving the board. © 2015 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Lost in Translation: The Accidental Origins of Bond v. United States

Bond v. United States, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided last year, weighed the constitutionally of using the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and its implementing act to prosecute U.S. citizens for local assaults. Prior to the decision, both parties and numerous amici believed that the case could transform key parts of federalism doctrine and/or U.S. foreign relations. This essay gives a retrospective on Bond and the CWC’s U.S. implementation. It shows that the federalism issues central to Bond were overlooked during the CWC’s ratification and implementation, and that Congress and the State Department never envisioned Bond-like uses of the CWC Implementation Act. It offers a theory for this oversight, and it attempts to explain why international law like the CWC sometimes translates poorly into domestic law. Finally, it shows how cases like Bond showcase the unintended effects of those mistranslations.
The brain-disordered defendant: neuroscience and legal insanity in the twenty-first century.

Brain-damaged defendants are seen everyday in American courtrooms, and in many cases, their criminal behavior appears to be the product of extremely poor judgment and self-control. Some have a disorder in the frontal lobes, the area of the brain responsible for judgment and impulse control. Yet because defendants suffering from frontal lobe dysfunction usually understand the difference between right and wrong, they are unable to avail themselves of the only insanity defense available in many states, a defense based on the narrow McNaghten test. “Irresistible impulse” (or “control”) tests, on the other hand, provide an insanity defense to those who committed a crime due to their inability to exercise behavioral control. Control tests have fallen into disfavor, however. Opponents of control tests offer three rationales for their abandonment: (1) that cognitive tests for insanity are sufficient, since those with impaired impulse control will also be cognitively impaired; (2) that mental health professionals are incapable of reliably assessing the capacity for impulse control, particularly in relation to criminal behavior, or of differentiating between a truly irresistible impulse and an impulse that is merely difficult to resist; and, therefore, that control tests lead to erroneous insanity acquittals; and, (3) that because “they directly pose the question of whether a person could control his or her behavior,” control tests run counter to the law’s assumption that people have free will and bear responsibility for their actions. Current neuroscience research presents a challenge to these claims. In the Article, I argue for a return to control tests for insanity, but with important doctrinal modifications. REDDING.OFFTOPRINTER 9/18/2006 1:18:17 PM 51 THE BRAIN-DISORDERED DEFENDANT: NEUROSCIENCE AND LEGAL INSANITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Multidimensional private value auctions

We consider parametric examples of symmetric two-bidder private value auctions in which each bidder observes her own private valuation as well as noisy signals about her opponent’s private valuation. We show that, in such environments, the revenue equivalence between the first and second price auctions (SPAs) breaks down and there is no definite revenue ranking; while the SPA is always efficient allocatively, the first price auction (FPA) may be inefficient; equilibria may fail to exist for the FPA. We also show that auction mechanisms provide different incentives for bidders to acquire costly information about opponents’ valuation.
Delisted firms and momentum profits

Abstract I find that approximately 40 percent of the momentum profit is generated by delisting returns. Most of the delisting-profit is derived from bankrupt firms, while merged firms have a minor effect on the momentum profitability. I further show that ex-ante, firms with high likelihood to go bankrupt exhibit stronger momentum, and firms with high likelihood to be merged exhibit weaker momentum; and that almost the entire profits of these bankruptcy- and merger-candidates strategies are generated by delisting returns. These findings have implications on the size and the implementability of momentum.
The Indigenous As Alien

Immigration law, as it is taught, studied, and researched in the United States, imagines away the fact of preexisting indigenous peoples. Why is this the case? I argue, first, that this elision reflects and reproduces how the field of immigration law narrates space, time, and national membership. But despite their disappearance from the field, Indians have figured in immigration law, and thus I describe the neglected legal history of the treatment of Indians under U.S. immigration and citizenship law.1 The Article then returns to explain why indigenous people have disappeared from immigration law through an investigation of the relationship between “We the People,” the “settler contract,” and the “nation of immigrants.” The story of the field of U.S. immigration law is typically a narrative of the assertion of national sovereign power that begins in the late 1880s with a trilogy of
Parents Involved and the Meaning of Brown : An Old Debate Renewed

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 the Supreme Court debated the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. This essay, prepared for a symposium on Parents Involved, traces the roots of the debate between color-blindness and anti-subordination to Brown itself and efforts to desegregate public schools in the wake of that decision but shows that the debate goes back at least as far as the tensions reflected in the first Justice Harlan's celebrated dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.
The Presumption against Expensive Health Care Consumption

This essay, as part of a symposium in honor of Professor Einer Elhauge, starts with his recognition that, for both epistemic and normative reasons, it remains profoundly difficult to regulate particular uses of medical technologies on the basis of their cost-benefit ratios. Nonetheless, this essay argues in favor of a general regulatory presumption against consumption for the most expensive medical technology usages, which drive most of aggregate healthcare spending. This essay synthesizes twelve facts about the ways in which medical technologies are produced, regulated, studied, and consumed to suggest that it is quite unlikely that the most expensive usages of medical technologies will have benefits exceeding their costs. These considerations include the contingent relationship between research investments and health outcomes, the FDA’s lack of authority to consider cost-effectiveness, and the prevalence of off-label uses that have no proof of efficacy. Where efficacy is shown, there are problems in scientific research including publication biases, lack of effective randomization and blinding, commercial biases in design and conduct, the use of surrogates for improved health, small demonstrated benefits not enjoyed by most consumers, and the lack of power and time to detect adverse outcomes. There are also market failures because consumers are unable to estimate benefits and have little or no exposure to cost, while their advisors, physicians, have misaligned incentives. Ultimately, aggregate data across time, geography, and experimental conditions shows that much medical spending is along the “flat of the curve,” not delivering commensurate healthcare value. Thus even without particularized rationing decisions, crude regulatory tools that reduce consumption, while preserving choice, are likely to promote rather than hinder welfare.
Productivity growth in the 1990s: technology, utilization, or adjustment?

Measured productivity growth increased substantially during the second half of the 1990s. This paper examines whether this increase owes to an increase in the rate of technological change or whether it can be explained by non-technological factors relating to factor utilization, factor accumulation, or returns to scale. It finds that the recent increase in productivity growth does appear to arise from an increase in technological change. Cyclical utilization raised measured productivity growth relative to technology growth in the first part of the expansion, but lowered it subsequently. Factor adjustment leads to a steady-state understatement of technology growth by measured productivity growth. The understatement was greater in the second half of the expansion than the first. Changes in the distribution of inputs across industries with different returns to scale lead to a modest understatement in the growth in technology. Although the increase technological change is most pronounced in durable manufacturing, technological change also increased outside of manufacturing.
The Influence of Prior Beliefs on Scientific Judgments of Evidence Quality

Abstract This paper is concerned with the influence of scientists′ prior beliefs on their judgments of evidence quality. A laboratory experiment using advanced graduate students in the sciences (study 1) and an experimental survey of practicing scientists on opposite sides of a controversial issue (study 2) revealed agreement effects. Research reports that agreed with scientists′ prior beliefs were judged to be of higher quality than those that disagreed. In study 1, a prior belief strength × agreement interaction was found, indicating that the agreement effect was larger among scientists who held strong prior beliefs. In both studies, the agreement effect was larger for general, evaluative judgments (e.g., relevance, methodological quality, results clarity) than for more specific, analytical judgments (e.g., adequacy of randomization procedures). A Bayesian analysis indicates that the pattern of agreement effects found in these studies may be normatively defensible, although arguments against implementing a Bayesian approach to scientific judgment are also advanced.
Institutional ownership stability and the cost of debt

Abstract This study documents that the stability of institutional ownership plays an important role in determining the cost of debt. After controlling for other determinants of the cost of debt, and correcting for the endogeneity of institutional ownership stability, three major results are uncovered. First, there is a robust negative relationship between the cost of debt and institutional ownership stability. Second, institutional ownership stability plays a bigger role in determining the cost of debt, than the institutional ownership level commonly used in the literature. Third, institutional ownership stability affects the cost of debt to a greater extent for firms that are subject to more severe information asymmetry and greater agency costs of debt.
Newell-Littlewood numbers

The Newell-Littlewood numbers are defined in terms of their celebrated cousins, the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. Both arise as tensor product multiplicities for a classical Lie group. They are the structure coefficients of the K. Koike-I. Terada basis of the ring of symmetric functions. Recent work of H. Hahn studies them, motivated by R. Langlands' beyond endoscopy proposal; we address her work with a simple characterization of detection of Weyl modules. This motivates further study of the combinatorics of the numbers. We consider analogues of ideas of J. De Loera-T. McAllister, H. Derksen-J. Weyman, S. Fomin-W. Fulton-C.-K. Li-Y.-T. Poon, W. Fulton, R. King-C. Tollu-F. Toumazet, M. Kleber, A. Klyachko, A. Knutson-T. Tao, T. Lam-A. Postnikov-P. Pylyavskyy, K. Mulmuley-H. Narayanan-M. Sohoni, H. Narayanan, A. Okounkov, J. Stembridge, and H. Weyl.
CAUSAL ANALYSIS AFTER HAAVELMO

Haavelmo’s seminal 1943 and 1944 papers are the first rigorous treatment of causality. In them, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification. He showed that causal parameters are defined using hypothetical models that assign variation to some of the inputs determining outcomes while holding all other inputs fixed. He thus formalized and made operational Marshall’s (1890) ceteris paribus analysis. We embed Haavelmo’s framework into the recursive framework of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) commonly used in the literature of causality (Pearl, 2000) and Bayesian nets (Lauritzen, 1996). We compare the analysis of causality based on a methodology inspired by Haavelmo’s ideas with other approaches used in the causal literature of DAGs. We discuss the limitations of methods that solely use the information expressed in DAGs for the identification of economic models. We extend our framework to consider models for simultaneous causality, a central contribution of Haavelmo.
Price Dynamics in the Regular and E-Mini Futures Markets

This paper examines the price dynamics in the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 index futures contracts. By utilizing transactions data with attached trader type identification codes, we are able to analyze price dynamics for trades initiated by exchange locals and off-exchange customers. The empirical results show that price discovery appears to be initiated in the E-mini index futures contracts and that trades initiated by exchange locals seem to be more informative than those initiated by off-exchange traders. Furthermore, results show that exchange locals appear to make informed trades on the E-mini contracts around large trades that occur on the open outcry floor. We maintain that the exchange locals' ability to observe pit dynamics may contribute toward explaining the price leadership of the Emini contracts. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that exchange locals are informed traders who derive their informational advantage from the proximity to order flow.
Does Good Economics Make for Good Politics? Evidence from Indian States

The proposition that voters reward incumbent governments that perform well economically is considered received wisdom in many democracies. We examine this hypothesis in India, a developing democracy where scholars have found limited evidence of economic voting. Using a unique state-level panel dataset covering the years 1980–2012, we find that there is no relationship between growth and electoral performance in the aggregate. However, since 2000, there do appear to be increasing electoral returns to governments that deliver higher rates of economic growth. The positive returns to growth are much larger than those to improved law and order, while inflation has no clear impact. The results suggest a significant shift in Indian voter behavior.
Property, Aspen, and Refusals to Deal

Property entails many rights, the most important of which is the right to exclude. Even at common law, however, this right was not absolute. Instead, courts qualified the right in rare cases when such qualification was necessary to facilitate the lowcost formation of efficient markets. Antitrust regulation follows this common law tradition, further qualifying rights of contract and property when necessary to prevent market failure.
Acceleration of tropical cyclones as a proxy for extratropical interactions: synoptic-scale patterns and long-term trends

Abstract. It is well known that rapid changes in tropical-cyclone motion occur during interaction with extratropical waves. While the translation speed has received much attention in the published literature, acceleration has not. Using a large data sample of Atlantic tropical cyclones, we formally examine the composite synoptic-scale patterns associated with tangential and curvature components of their acceleration. During periods of rapid tangential acceleration, the composite tropical cyclone moves poleward between an upstream trough and downstream ridge of a developing extratropical wave packet. The two systems subsequently merge in a manner that is consistent with extratropical transition. During rapid curvature acceleration, a prominent downstream ridge promotes recurvature of the tropical cyclone. In contrast, during rapid tangential deceleration or near-zero curvature acceleration, a ridge is located directly poleward of the tropical cyclone. Locally, this arrangement takes the form of a cyclone–anticyclone vortex pair. On average, the tangential acceleration peaks 18 h prior to extratropical transition, while the curvature acceleration peaks at recurvature. These findings confirm that rapid acceleration of tropical cyclones is mediated by interaction with extratropical baroclinic waves. Furthermore, the tails of the distribution of acceleration and translation speed show a robust reduction over the past 5 decades. We speculate that these trends may reflect the poleward shift and weakening of extratropical Rossby waves.
China's changing energy intensity trend: A decomposition analysis

China experienced a dramatic decline in energy intensity from the onset of economic reform in the late 1970s until 2000, but since then the rate of decline slowed and energy intensity actually increased in 2003. Most previous studies found that most of the decline was due to technological change, but disagreed on the role of structural change. To the best of our knowledge, no decomposition study has investigated the role of inter-fuel substitution in the decline in energy intensity or the causes of the rise in energy intensity since 2000. In this paper, we use logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) techniques to decompose changes in energy intensity in the period 1980–2003. We find that: (1) technological change is confirmed as the dominant contributor to the decline in energy intensity; (2) structural change at the industry and sector (sub-industry) level actually increased energy intensity over the period of 1980–2003, although the structural change at the industry level was very different in the 1980s and in the post-1990 period; (3) structural change involving shifts of production between sub-sectors, however, decreased overall energy intensity; (4) the increase in energy intensity since 2000 is explained by negative technological progress; (5) inter-fuel substitution is found to contribute little to the changes in energy intensity.
The Rules of the Game and the Morality of Efficient Breach

Moralists have long criticized the theory of efficient breach for its advocacy of promise breaking. But a fully developed theory of efficient breach has an internal morality of its own. It argues that sophisticated parties contract for efficient breach, which in the long run maximizes everyone’s welfare. And the theory marks some breaches — those that are opportunistic, obstructive, or otherwise inefficient — as wrongs that the law should deter, as transgressions that should not be priced but punished. That internal morality, however, does not excuse the theory from moral scrutiny. An extended comparison to Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, La Regle du Jeu (“The Rules of the Game”), illustrates what more sophisticated moral criticisms of the theory might look like. Renoir’s film depicts a society in which marital infidelity is a transgression that is tolerated, but only when done according to society’s rules. Renoir’s attitude toward that society suggests that moral critics of the efficient breach theory should focus not on its celebration of efficient breach, but on the value of the sort of moral community it imagines and on the theory’s effect on parties who are not playing the efficient breach game, whether because they do not understand its rules or because they seek a different type of obligation. The comparison to the film also highlights the theory’s own narrative elements, which both add to its persuasive power and, once identified, mark out its limits.
A Survey of Governance Disclosures Among U.S. Firms

Recent years have featured a spate of regulatory action pertaining to the development and/or disclosure of corporate governance structures in response to financial scandals resulting in part from governance failures. During the same period, corporate governance activists and institutional investors increasingly have called for increased voluntary governance disclosure. Despite this attention, there have been relatively few comprehensive studies of governance disclosure practices and response to the regulation. In this study, we examine a sample of 50 U.S. firms and their public disclosure packages from 2004. We find a high degree of variability in the presentation and reporting format choices for many elements of the governance structure. This variability includes several items for which disclosure is mandated by regulators or legislative action. In particular, smaller firms offer fewer disclosures pertaining to independence, board selection procedures, and oversight of management (including whistleblowing procedures). There are also trends associated with board characteristics: boards that are less independent offer fewer disclosures of independence and management oversight matters. Moreover, large firms provide more disclosures of independence standards, board selection procedures, audit committee matters, management control systems, other committee matters, and whistleblowing procedures but do not appear to have a strictly superior information environment when compared to smaller firms. The findings raise questions about compliance with regulatory requirements and the degree to which conflicts of interest between managers and directors are being controlled. While there have been notable improvements in the information environment of governance disclosures, there remain structural issues that may possess negative ramifications for stakeholders.
Financing Entrepreneurial Production: Security Design with Flexible Information Acquisition

We propose a theory of security design in financing entrepreneurial production, positing that the investor can acquire costly information on the entrepreneur’s project before making the financing decision. When the entrepreneur has enough bargaining power in security design, the optimal security helps incentivize both efficient information acquisition and efficient financing. Debt is optimal when information is not very valuable for production, whereas the combination of debt and equity is optimal when information is valuable. If, instead, the investor has sufficiently strong bargaining power in security design or can acquire information only after financing, equity is optimal.Received October 12, 2015; editorial decision February 10, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.
Economic Consequences of Going Concern Audit Opinions in Nonprofit Charitable Organizations

ABSTRACT: This study examines the economic consequences of going concern audit reports (GCARs) in nonprofit charitable organizations (NPOs) using a sample of public charities that received initial GCARs between 1998 and 2003. I find that GCARs are negatively correlated with subsequent government grants. This evidence suggests either that the government utilizes GCARs as a screening criterion in its funding decisions or that affected NPOs voluntarily withdraw their grant applications. GCARs and subsequent contributions are also negatively correlated. There is no evidence of a significant correlation between a GCAR and the NPO's subsequent public support. The findings indicate detectable adverse economic consequences of GCARs in the nonprofit sector. Data Availability: Data used in this study are from public sources.
From Baby M to Baby M(anji): Regulating International Surrogacy Agreements

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