cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
American Indian Tribes and Secession

Critics of American Indian law have often complained about federal interference in the internal affairs of American Indian nations. The author ponders how independent the critics really want American Indian nations to be and whether secession theory might help us think about the theory and practice of really independent American Indian nations.
The seabots are coming here : should they be treated as 'vessels'?

Unmanned Marine Vehicles (UMVs), like their aerial cousins Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are not easily classified under existing legal regimes. Even though unmanned, should these seagoing drones be treated as ‘vessels’ under the Law of the Sea Convention articles on navigation rights and duties? Are they ‘vessels’ under the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs, 1972)? If so, should they be accorded a manoeuvring priority vis-a-vis other vessels? Are the differences between autonomous UMVs and the increasingly automated manned vessels all that great, such that classification should turn on whether the vessel is manned rather than on how navigation and collision avoidance decisions are made and executed?
Valuation and systemic risk consequences of bank opacity

Abstract We examine the effects of opacity on bank valuation and synchronicity in bank equity returns over the years 2000–2006 prior to the 2007 financial crisis. As expected, investments in opaque assets are more profitable than investments in transparent assets, and taking profitability into account, have larger valuation discounts relative to transparent assets. The valuation discounts on opaque asset investments decline over the 2000–2006 period only to be followed by a sharp reversal in 2007. The decline is coincident with a rise in bank equity share prices, decrease in transparent asset holdings by banks, and greater return synchronicity – evidence consistent with a feedback effect.
What's Wrong with Economics? It Ignores the Pogo Principle: "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us"

The piece begins with the proposition that the economic perspective on human activity must reflect the fact that human beings transact in a world defined for the actors by social norms. An analysis of the crisis of 2008 is offered as a demonstration of the value of adopting such a broader perspective. Part two offers a historical model based on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy of such a broader analysis. The piece closes with the case that the history of ideas offers alternative perspectives on the questions we explore in economics today and thus can serve as a valuable resource for constructive skepticism of the current discourse.
What are the Statistical Limits of Offline RL with Linear Function Approximation

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation methods (to deal with the curse of dimensionality) can provide a means to help alleviate the excessive sample complexity burden in modern sequential decision making problems. However, the extent to which this broader approach can be effective is not well understood, where the literature largely consists of sufficient conditions. This work focuses on the basic question of what are necessary representational and distributional conditions that permit provable sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning. Perhaps surprisingly, our main result shows that even if: i) we have realizability in that the true value function of \emph{every} policy is linear in a given set of features and 2) our off-policy data has good coverage over all features (under a strong spectral condition), then any algorithm still (information-theoretically) requires a number of offline samples that is exponential in the problem horizon in order to non-trivially estimate the value of \emph{any} given policy. Our results highlight that sample-efficient offline policy evaluation is simply not possible unless significantly stronger conditions hold; such conditions include either having low distribution shift (where the offline data distribution is close to the distribution of the policy to be evaluated) or significantly stronger representational conditions (beyond realizability).
Testing for persistence in stock returns with GARCH-stable shocks

We investigate persistence in CRSP monthly excess stock returns, using a state space model with stable disturbances. The non-Gaussian state space model with volatility persistence is estimated by maximum likelihood, using the optimal filtering algorithm given by Sorenson and Alspach (1971 Automatica 7 465–79). The conditional distribution has a stable α of 1.89, and normality is strongly rejected even after accounting for GARCH. However, stock returns do not contain a significant mean-reverting component. The optimal predictor is the unconditional expectation of the series, which we estimate to be 9.8% per annum.
“Green” Voting and Ideology: LCV Scores and Roll-Call Voting in the U.S. Senate, 1988–1998

This study evaluates the roles of ideology, constituency, and political party for roll-call voting in the U.S. Senate on a broad set of environmental issues. The study estimates a model of political support using voting scores from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) for the period 1988-1998, including observations on 91 senators for 130 roll-call votes. The study decomposes the scale-adjusted scores into relative weights due to the general electorate, the senator's support constituency, party leadership, and ideology. The main findings are that a senator's ideology is by far the most important consideration for voting profiles on environmental issues, and that party affiliation and regional loyalty explain about 74% of measured ideology. Hence, “green” voting tends to be highly partisan.
The United States Supreme Court resolves the effect of disability benefit claims upon Americans with Disabilities Act complaints in Cleveland v. Policy Management Systems Corporation

Federal courts have grappled with the issue of whether claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act should be barred, or judicially estopped, by the plaintiff's earlier application for or receipt of disability benefits. This is a particularly vexing problem since recipients of disability benefits are presumed to be disabled even though they are not disabled for a particular job. These individuals, who are social security recipients and still, are qualified for a job yet they suffer adverse employment decisions in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This article clarifies the law based on the Supreme Court decision, Cleveland v. Policy Mgmt. Systems Corp., finding that recipients of social security should not be precluded from pursuit of claims under the disability laws. This decision best effectuates the goals of protecting the disabled while promoting full participation in the workforce for all Americans.
Strategic Cooperation Modeling Concurring Behavior on the U.S. Supreme Court

How do competing motivations influence the decisions of justices to author concurring opinions? Justices must balance their desire to shape the law and public policy toward their preferred position...
True Spreads and Equilibrium Prices

Stocks and other financial assets are traded at prices that lie on a fixed grid determined by the minimum tick size. Observed prices and quoted spreads do not correspond to the equilibrium prices and true spreads that would exist in a market with no minimum tick size. Using Monte Carlo Markov Chain methods, this paper estimates the equilibrium prices and true spreads. For large stocks, most of the quoted spread is attributable to the rounding of prices and the adverse selection component is small. The true spread and the adverse selection component are greater for mid-sized stocks. As A WEDGE BETWEEN WHAT BUYERS PAY and what sellers receive, the bid-ask spread has long interested students of transaction costs. Apart from order processing costs, the market microstructure literature has focused on two main components of the spread: the inventory and the adverse selection costs of trading. Demsetz (1968), Stoll (1978), and Ho and Stoll (1981, 1983) model the inventory holding costs of market makers whereas Copeland and Galai (1983), Glosten and Milgrom (1985), Kyle (1985), and Easley and O'Hara (1987) model the adverse selection costs. A number of empirical models measure the components of the spread. Roll (1984), Stoll (1989), and George, Kaul, and Nimalendran (1991) make inferences about the spread from the serial covariance properties of transaction prices. Glosten and Harris (1988), Madhavan and Smidt (1991), Huang and Stoll (1997), and Madhavan, Richardson, and Roomans (1997) use a trade indicator model to make inferences about the spread. Hasbrouck (1988, 1991, 1993) models the time series of quotes and trades in a vector autoregression framework. Most of the above models ignore the institutional feature of discretization. In fact, discreteness has often been treated as something to be addressed while examining other
Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs. Conditional on their consumption level, there is little evidence that village elites and their relatives are more likely to receive aid programs than non-elites. However, this overall result masks stark differences between different types of elites: those holding formal leadership positions are more likely to receive benefits, while informal leaders are less likely to receive them. We show that capture by formal elites occurs when program benefits are actually distributed to households, and not during the processes of determining who should be on the beneficiary lists. However, while elite capture exists, the welfare losses it creates appear small: since formal elites and their relatives are only 9 percent richer than non-elites, are at most about 8 percentage points more likely to receive benefits than non-elites, and represent at most 15 percent of the population, eliminating elite capture entirely would improve the welfare gains from these programs by less than one percent.
The Demand For NFL Attendance: A Rational Addiction Model

This paper examines the demand for attendance at National Football League (NFL) games using a rational addiction model to test the hypothesis that professional football displays the properties of a habit-forming good. Rational addiction theory suggests that past and future consumption play a part in determining the current period’s consumption for habit-forming goods. Additionally, we postulate the behavioral implications of profit-maximizing ticket pricing behavior by NFL teams. Previous studies have been unable to detect pricing power by NFL teams. Our model of pricing power allows us to identify theoretically- anticipated pricing behavior. A pooled data set is collected using statistics from each NFL team from the 1983 to the 2008 seasons. Current attendance is modeled as a function of team specific variables, including past and future attendance, ticket price, and team performance. The model is estimated using Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS). We also treat the censored nature of ticket demand as NFL teams frequently experience sell-outs. It is found that past and future attendance, winning percentage, the age of the stadium in which a team plays, and own-price demand elasticity influence attendance. The fact that coefficients for past and future attendance are positive and significant in this analysis lends support to the notion that NFL fans display characteristics of rational addiction in their consumption behavior. Further, we find evidence to support profit-maximizing behavior in ticket sales.
Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality

Access to civil justice is a perspective on the experiences that people have with civil justice events, organizations, or institutions. It focuses on who is able or willing to use civil law and law-like processes and institutions (who has access) and with what results (who receives what kinds of justice). This article reviews what we know about access to civil justice and race, social class, and gender inequality. Three classes of mechanisms through which inequality may be reproduced or exacerbated emerge: the unequal distribution of resources and costs, groups’ distinct subjective orientations to law or to their experiences, and differential institutionalization of group or individual interests. Evidence reveals that civil justice experiences can be an important engine in reproducing inequalities and deserve greater attention from inequality scholars. However, the inequality-conserving picture in part reflects scholars’ past choices about what to study: Much research has focused narrowly on the use of fo...
Investors' Response to Revelations of Prior Uncorrected Misstatements

SUMMARY: This study examines investors' response to the disclosure of prior-period waived misstatements under Staff Accounting Bulletin (SAB) No. 108, Considering the Effects of Prior Year Misstatements When Quantifying Misstatements in the Current Year. Misstatement correction decisions typically are not observable, and financial statement users have little insight into the disposition of identified misstatements, a dimension of audit and financial statement quality. We find that investors respond negatively to the disclosure of SAB No. 108 misstatements, and this response is associated with the current-period auditor initially waiving the misstatement and client importance. Although SAB No. 108 misstatements were waived under prevailing materiality guidance, our findings suggest that investors interpret SAB No. 108 misstatements as indicating lower perceived audit quality. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources indicated in the text.
A Shred of Evidence on Theories of Wage Stickiness

A small interview survey was undertaken to see how actual wage-setters would react to the central ideas of several economic theories of wage stickiness. Wage cuts were surprisingly prevalent in recent years, despite the booming economy. The strongest finding was that managers believe that perceptions of fairness play a major motivational role in labor markets and that a "fair" wage policy is a good deal more complicated than simply not cutting wages. We also found substantial evidence for money illusion and against the adverse-selection version of the efficiency wage model. Why are wages sticky, especially in the downward direction? Does the stickiness apply to nominal, real, or relative wages? Although these questions are central to at least some macroeconomic theories, satisfactory answers have eluded economists for decades-though not for lack of theoretical effort. Almost a decade ago, Arthur Okun [1981, p. 9] opined that "the Keynesian wage floor has been subjected to more Talmudic exegesis than any other passage in the history of economics." In the intervening years the theoretical literature on wage rigidity has exploded. By now economists have more theories than they know what to do with. Empirical research is supposed to discriminate among competing theories; and econometric evidence may eventually eliminate some theories from contention. Currently, though, it seems to us that new theories are sprouting up faster than old ones are being rejected. Part of the problem is that many theories of wage rigidity rely on unobservable variables and hence are difficult to reject with the kinds of data that econometricians usually have. With this problem in mind, we turn in this study to an unconventional type of data, the sort that economists (alone among social scientists) rarely use: we actually asked a small sample of wage-setters about the nature and sources of wage rigidity in their own companies.1
Do Managers Give Hometown Labor an Edge

In line with the psychological theory of place attachments, managers favor hometown workers over others. Consistent with this prediction, I find that following periods of industry distress, establishments located near CEOs’ childhood homes experience fewer employment and pay reductions and are less likely to be divested relative to other firm establishments. While it is not possible to directly test whether this employment bias destroys firm value, managers only implement these policies when governance is weak, suggesting that this favoritism is suboptimal. Together, these results provide direct evidence of employee favoritism and show that idiosyncratic manager styles impact corporate employment decisions. Received December 23, 2013; editorial decision January 3, 2017 by Editor Alexander Ljungqvist.
Pinning the feminine user: gender scripts in Pinterest’s sign-up interface

Popular social media site Pinterest is known for its strong female user base, something often attributed to the links, images, and ideas available on it. We argue that Pinterest’s popularity with w...
Reconceptualizing Environmental Challenges—Is Resilience the New Narrative?

We need to reexamine both our thinking about and our relationship to environmental and natural resource challenges. This includes facing the emerging realities of the Anthropocene: unprecedented and irreversible rates of biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. Combined, these and other factors are increasing the likelihood of rapid, non-linear, social and ecological regime changes. New policy directions and orientations are needed to provide the necessary capacity to deal with challenges in a meaningful and equitable ways. This article posits that the concept of “resilience” is emerging as a new narrative in both scholarly literature and policy discussions that has potential in this regard. After first situating resilience thinking within current and historical narratives regarding social-ecological relations, it examines the potential for resilience to shift the environmental governance paradigm in helpful ways.
Is the Rule of Necessity Really Necessary in State Administrative Law: The Central Panel Solution

The rule of necessity is a judicial doctrine that permits a judge or agency decision maker to decide a case even if he or she would ordinarily be disqualified due to bias or prejudice . The rationale of the doctrine is that if there is no other person who can make the decision, let the biased person decide the case rather than have no decision made at all. The rule of necessity has been used in state administrative proceedings liberally despite the fact that it is widely recognized as unfair. This article analyzes current approaches to the doctrine, and after concluding that they are inadequate, proposes a new approach that would best address the problem.It is proposed that the best approach is a requirement that any administrative case in which the rule of necessity might be invoked be decided by an administrative law judge who is a member of the state's central administrative panel. The central panel solution should be adopted in state administrative law to restore fairness and remove biased agency decision makers from state administrative proceedings.
TARGETED KILLINGS AND THE INTEREST CONVERGENCE DILEMMA

In the 1980s, Professor Derrick Bell posited a theory of interest convergence as part of his critical race theory work, arguing that the major strides forward in civil rights law and policy that benefited African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s only occurred because of the perceived benefits of those changes to white elites during that time. In Bell’s view, it was only at the point at which the interests of powerful whites converged with those of marginalized racial minorities that significant changes in civil rights law could occur. Twelve years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, numerous lawmakers, scholars, activists, and policy makers find themselves entrenched in a different struggle for civil and human rights: combating counterterrorism laws and policies that overreach in their efforts to detain, interrogate, surveil, and kill suspected terrorists. In this Symposium Essay, I use Professor Bell’s theory of interest convergence to frame the debate over an increasingly common counterterrorism tool: the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”) to target and kill individuals suspected of encouraging or planning terrorist acts. Interest convergence theory can help us examine the shifting parameters of the drone program in several ways: first, to map the areas of interest convergence between politically powerful groups and those interested in protecting marginalized groups such as Muslims and Arabs, which can help explain why certain limitations on the use of targeted killings have been put into place already; second, to consider the plausibility of the fulfillment of the promises made by President * Professor of Law, Western New England University School of Law. J.D., Columbia Law School, 1999; A.B., Stanford University, 1995. This symposium paper is based in part , an adapted from, a full-length article: Sudha Setty, National Security Interest Convergence, 4 HARV. NAT’L SEC. J. 185 (2012). I thank my colleagues, particularly Professor Bridgette Baldwin, for organizing the symposium, Building the Arc of Justice: The Life and Legal Thought of Derrick Bell, in September 2012, at which I presented the original version of this paper. I thank the editors at the Western New England Law Review, particularly John Paul Callahan, for their work on this Article.
Rethinking the Fourth Amendment: Race, Citizenship, and the Equality Principle

Notwithstanding claims that the election of President Barack Obama signals a post-racial epoch, one does not have to look far for evidence that race still matters. It is particularly evident in how we police, which remains very much racially inflected. Even when racial animus is absent, there often persists the perception that racial bias is present, even inevitable, as the recent firestorm over the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates attests to. Scholars such as Randall Kennedy have long argued that disparate treatment by police amounts to the imposition of a “racial tax.” But this comparison, while descriptively apt, falls short of capturing the complexity and interconnectivity of the harms resulting from disparate treatment. It is time for a broader argument. It is time to identify such disparate treatment, as well as the perception of disparate treatment, for what it is: a flaw in our claim of equal citizenship. This Article makes that argument.To remedy this state of affairs, this Article proposes a new criminal procedure revolution, one that understands criminal procedure rights, and specifically the Fourth Amendment, as inextricably linked to citizenship rights. This new criminal procedure would re-conceptualize reasonable suspicion and consensual encounters, encourage randomization, and reinvigorate civil actions, all with a view of furthering the goal of equal citizenship. While these changes may not eliminate race-based policing entirely, they will move us significantly closer to the goal of equal citizenship. And they will move us closer to a post-racial America.
Slutwalking in the Shadow of the Law

This Article examines the convergence of two seemingly contradictory developments. One is the widespread rape of women by acquaintances, dates, and intimates, mostly without legal recourse. The other is the emergence of a generation of women who embrace a pro-sex orientation and define their sexualities accordingly. To date, legal theorists have failed to reconcile this move toward sex positivity with the ubiquity of non-stranger rape. SlutWalk – the global grassroots initiative that protests rape by embracing sex – provides a vehicle for first exploring tensions that arise when sexual agency is asserted against a backdrop of pervasive sexual violation. On analysis, sexual agency must be reconceived, which in turn exposes new perspectives on rape law and informs the next phase of reform.
Financial Instrument Fair Values and Nonfinancial Firms

This study examines whether financial instrument fair values help explain the cross-sectional variation in nonfinancial firms' equity values. Regressions of equity values on recognized financial st...
The Dynamic Effects of Obesity on the Wages of Young Workers

This paper considers effects of body mass on wages in the years following labor market entry. The preferred models allow current wages to be affected by both past and current body mass, as well as past wages, while also addressing the endogeneity of body mass. I find that a history of severe obesity has a large negative effect on the wages of white men. White women face a penalty for a history of being overweight, with some evidence of additional penalties that begin above the threshold for severe obesity. Furthermore, the effects of past wages on current wages imply that past body mass has additional, indirect effects on wages, especially for white women.
Derivatives Usage: Value-Adding Or Destroying?

The following article tests the wealth-building nature of derivatives usage in non-financial firms. Investigating 434 firms and employing univariate and multivariate tests, it uses both the fair values and notional values of firms’ derivatives contracts to determine whether derivatives usage enhances or destroys firm value.
Diabetes Treatments and Moral Hazard

Abstract In the face of rising rates of diabetes, many states have passed laws requiring health insurance plans to cover medical treatments for the disease. Although supporters of the mandates expect them to improve the health of diabetics, the mandates have the potential to generate a moral hazard to the extent that medical treatments might displace individual behavioral improvements. Another possibility is that the mandates do little to improve insurance coverage for most individuals, as previous research on benefit mandates has suggested that mandates often duplicate what plans already cover. To examine the effects of these mandates, we employ a triple‐differences methodology comparing the change in the gap in body mass index (BMI) between diabetics and nondiabetics in mandate and nonmandate states. We find that mandates do generate a moral hazard problem, with diabetics exhibiting higher BMIs after the adoption of these mandates.
Growth diagnostics for a resource-rich transition economy : the case of Mongolia

This paper uses a growth diagnostics approach a la Hausmann, Rodrik, and Velasco (HRV) to identify the most 'binding' constraints to private sector growth in Mongolia - a small, low-income, mineral-rich, transition economy. The approach of applying the HRV methodology is useful in those cases where a lack of data prevents us from estimating shadow prices to identify the most 'binding' constraint to growth. We find that although Mongolia is not liquidity constrained and has grown rapidly in recent years, economic growth has been narrowly based. Investment has flowed mainly into a small number of firms operating in mining and construction. The low level of private investment in sectors outside mining and construction has been due to low returns - a result of costly and unreliable transportation services; lengthy and complex transit procedures, including customs and trade rules; distortionary taxes; coordination failures, at both domestic and international levels; and growing corruption. Poor financial intermediation is also a problem that has kept the cost of finance high, although lower than in previous years. Alleviating these binding constraints will ensure that Mongolia maintains the path towards sustained, broad-based growth.
Agency Regulation in Copyright Law: Rulemaking under the DMCA and Its Broader Implications

On July 27, 2010, the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office issued the final rule for the fourth round of the triennial rulemaking process under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). The new exemptions created by the final rule indicate that agency regulation could re-infuse flexibility in both the DMCA specifically and copyright legislation generally. Although some have criticized the triennial rule-making process as too narrow, the latest round was broader than the first three rounds, particularly in the number, scope, and importance of the exemptions. If this expansion continues, together with modifications to the rule-making process and with more authority vested in the Copyright Office, the DMCA triennial rule-making process could set a precedent for implementing greater agency involvement in an increasingly regulatory form of copyright law.This Note first outlines copyright’s transition to a regulatory model, the reasons for this change, its benefits and harms, and the DMCA’s fit within the regulatory scheme. It then illustrates the mechanics of § 1201 and focuses on the rule-making provision’s notice-and-comment process. It then outlines each round’s exemptions, the positive trend from round to round, criticisms of the DMCA rule-making process, and proposals for addressing these criticisms in order to bolster expansion in round five. Overall, this analysis suggests that expanding the Copyright Office’s role in copyright law may be beneficial, due to the tension between regulatory copyright legislation and rapid technological advances as well as the Register’s performance in the DMCA rule-making process.
Analyzing How Local Governments Establish Service Priorities

Resource limitations and increasing citizen expectations are causing decisionmakers to reexamine existing approaches to establishing priorities in the funding of governmental services. Using local governments as a contextual example, this article investigates the decision making processes used by Texas cities The research seeks to understand the role different budgetary frameworks, i.e., incremental, performance and community values, play in resource allocation. Factors such as the budget sequence, the participants and the reference sources are considered to better understand local budget deliberations. This research indicates that a mixed or hybrid framework (any combination of the incremental, performance and community values approaches) dominates decision making in Texas cities. That is, most cities attempt to incorporate the politicalness of incrementalism, the results orientation of the performance framework, and the utility maximization desired under the community values framework. Results from this research indicate that Texas cities are moving away from a single framework orientation as a rule and are incorporating more rational and participative aspects into their budget process. This refutes common wisdom on this topic and suggests a more complicated approach to decision making that emphasizes the injection of more objective performance-related data, as well as the subjective perceptions of non-traditionally dominant participant groups.
A Shining City on a Hill: American Exceptionalism and the Supreme Court's Practice of Relying on Foreign Law

INTRODUCTION 1336 I. THE SUPREME COURT AND FOREIGN SOURCES OF LAW: TWO CENTURIES OF PRACTICE 1341 II. THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY OF EXCEPTIONALISM: FOUR CENTURIES OF EXCEPTIONALIST RHETORIC AND SELF-DEFINITION . 1344 A. The Origins of American Exceptionalism in Europe and the American Colonies 1345 B. American Exceptionalism in the Founding Era 1352 C. American Exceptionalism in the Nineteenth Century 1359 D. American Exceptionalism in the Twentieth Century 1366 III. THE REALITY OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A SUMMARY OF SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH THE UNITED STATES HAS BECOME AN EXCEPTIONAL NATION 1373 A. Observations of Foreign Travelers 1374 B. The Ideology of Being an American 1375 1. Crime and Divorce Rates 1375 2. Patriotism and Optimism 1376 C. Social Egalitarianism and Libertarian Economics 1377 D. Religion 1379 E. A Moralistic Country 1382 1. Prohibition of Alcohol, Drugs, and Smoking 1384 2. American Moralism and the Paranoid Style 1385 F. Private Philanthropy 1386 G. Small Public Sector 1387 H. No Socialists, Anti-Union Sentiment, and a Large Conservative Movement 1389 I. Military and Foreign Affairs Power 1392
Another Look at Wage Distortion in a Developing Dual Economy

The paper focuses on an endogenous wage distortion in a developing dual economy where an efficiency wage in the urban sector triggers rural-urban migration. Because of the endogenous nature of the distortion, this migration reduces the severity of distortion by creating more jobs and reducing the actual wage differential between the sectors. These results are in sharp contrast to the outcomes of an exogenous wage distortion (minimum wage) where rural-urban migration increases the severity of unemployment and calls for costly policy mechanisms that might be either politically or economically difficult to implement. Furthermore, in contrast to the case of an exogenous distortion, interregional migration with endogenous wage distortion increases urban industrial output and structural transformation works its way into the development process. This structural transformation is maintained even when this dual economy engages in the production of non-traded goods. Although this paper does not engage in policy ranking to bring in zero unemployment equilibrium, it shows that it is possible to achieve socially desirable level of migration by influencing detection rate of shirking or disutility of work effort instead of using costly distributive parameters such as taxes and subsidies.
Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry

This Article confronts the thorny questions that arise in attempting to apply traditional employment and labor law to “crowdsourcing,” an emerging online labor model unlike any that has existed to this point. Crowdsourcing refers to the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the “crowd,” in the form of an open call. The Article describes how crowdsourcing works, its advantages and risks, and why workers in particular subsections of the paid crowdsourcing industry may be denied the protection of employment laws without much recourse to vindicate their rights. Taking Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform as a case study, the Article explores the nature of this employment relationship in order to determine the legal status of the “crowd.” The Article also details the complications that might arise in applying existing work laws to crowd labor. Finally, the Article presents a series of brief recommendations. It encourages legislatures to clarify and expand legal protections for crowdsourced employees, and suggests ways for courts and administrative agencies to pursue the same objective within our existing legal framework. It also offers voluntary “best practices” for firms and venues involved in crowdsourcing, along with examples of how crowd workers might begin to effectively organize and advocate on their own behalf.
Eating Our Cake and Having It, Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult in Law Schools

This essay discusses the experiences of one law school trying to integrate the rankings into its strategic plan. It discusses the intersection of considerations designed to improve the rankings with considerations designed to improve the school as a whole, and it mentions the difficulties inherent in strategic planning in an academic environment.
Auctions in bankruptcy

Abstract This paper examines whether mandatory auctions promote the efficient restructuring of distressed firms relative to a reorganization-based bankruptcy system such as Chapter 11. Under a mandatory auction system, aggressive bidding by a coalition of incumbent management and pre-bankruptcy creditors may deter outside bidders, may result in the coalition paying more than its valuation to acquire the firm, and may result in assets remaining in a lower value use. In a reorganization-based bankruptcy system, management's voluntary choice to seek an auction conveys information about the coalition's valuation, which facilitates competition. Our model shows that a reorganization-based bankruptcy system that encourages, but does not mandate auctions, can actually increase the likelihood that an outside bidder enters and the assets of the bankrupt firm are redeployed.
Implications of Impairment Decisions and Assets' Cash-Flow Horizons for Conservatism Research

ABSTRACT: Accountants examine multiple indicators when assessing whether individual assets are impaired. Different indicators predict cash flows over varying time horizons, and their importance var...
From Caesar to Tacitus: changes in early Germanic governance circa 50 BC-50 AD

Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus provide characterizations of early Germanic (barbarian) society around, respectively, 50 BC and 50 AD. The earlier date corresponds to expansion of Rome to the Rhine and Danube. During the subsequent century Germanic governance institutions changed in a number of ways. In particular, (1) temporary military commanders elected from the nobility gave way to standing retinues under the leadership of professional commanders, (2) public assemblies met more frequently and regularly, (3) councils made up of nobility gained agenda control in the assemblies, and (4) these councils relinquished their control over the allocations of land. I account for these constitutional exchanges in light of Rome’s encroachment. This encroachment brought new sources of wealth as well as constraints on the expansion of Germans into new lands. Incentives favored a reallocation of resources away from pastoralism and towards both sedentary farming and raids across the frontier.
Hedging credit: Equity liquidity matters

Abstract We theorize and confirm a new channel by means of which liquidity costs are embedded in CDS spreads. We show that credit default swap (CDS) spreads are directly related to equity market liquidity in the Merton [Merton, R.C., 1974. On the pricing of corporate debt: The risk structure of interest rates. J. Finance 29, 449–470] model via hedging. We confirm this relationship empirically using a sample of 1452 quarterly CDS spreads over 2001–2005. In the model, this relationship is monotone increasing when credit quality worsens. These results are robust to alternative measures of equity liquidity and other possible determinants of CDS spreads.
Constitutional Interpretation and History: New Originalism or Eclecticism?

The goal of originalism has always been purity. Originalists claim that their methods cleanse constitutional interpretation of politics, discretion, and indeterminacy. The key to attaining purity is history. Originalist methods supposedly discern in history a fixed constitutional meaning. Many originalists now claim that the most advanced method—the approach that reveals the purest constitutional meaning—is reasonable-person originalism. These new originalists ask the following question: When the Constitution was adopted, how would a hypothetical reasonable person have understood the text? This Article examines historical evidence from the early decades of nationhood to achieve two goals. First, it demonstrates that reasonable-person originalism is incoherent at its historical core. As an interpretive method, originalism cannot achieve its stated goal: to identify fixed and objective constitutional meanings. Contrary to originalist claims, historical research uncovers contingencies and contexts. More specifically, the evidence shows that reasonable-person originalism is historically unjustified. Early in the nation’s history, neither lawyers nor laypersons would have suggested that constitutional interpretation should be based on the views of a hypothetical reasonable person. Second, the Article demonstrates that the historical evidence instead supports an alternative conception of constitutional interpretation. In the early decades, numerous Americans—including framers, Supreme Court justices, and constitutional scholars—used an eclectic or pluralist approach to constitutional interpretation. Depending on the case, an eclectic interpreter considered a shifting variety of factors, including original meaning, framers’ intentions, practical consequences, and judicial precedents. * Jerry W. Housel/Carl F. Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, University of Wyoming. I thank Jack Balkin, Mark Tushnet, and Sam Kalen for their comments on earlier drafts and Joshua Eames for his research assistance. FELDMAN.FINAL (UPDATED 6.11) (DO NOT DELETE) 6/10/2014 8:04 PM BYU Journal of Public Law [Vol. 28 284 Table of
The Bubble and the Lost Decade

In this overview of the Symposium papers, we note that the bubble that occurred in Japan’s asset markets in the late 1980s came at a time when the conventional indicators of Japan’s economic performance were relatively stable. Following the collapse of the bubble, neither the Bank of Japan (BOJ) nor the Ministry of finance (MOF) took timely and effective measures to deal with the recession that followed. While the evidence suggests that looser fiscal policy would have been ineffective, monetary policy measures might have worked. However, the BOJ followed a relatively tight monetary policy in 1991‐93. In the face of the liquidity trap that ensued in the last of the 1990s, the conventional tools of stabilisation policy appeared to be of limited use. Tthe Japanese economy to recover from the ‘lost decade,’ we thus discuss a number of unconventional and bold measures that the BOJ and MOF could pursue. It appears, however, that the political will is absent to undertake such measures. So long as this is the case, the effects of the lost decade will continue to act as a drag on the economy.
Risk aversion and compliance in markets for pollution control

This paper examines the effects of risk aversion on compliance choices in markets for pollution control. A firm’s decision to be compliant or not is independent of its manager’s risk preference. However, noncompliant firms with risk averse managers will have lower violations than otherwise identical firms with risk neutral managers. The violations of noncompliant firms with risk averse managers are independent of differences in their benefits from emissions and their initial allocations of permits if and only if their managers’ utility functions exhibit constant absolute risk aversion. However, firm-level characteristics do impact violation choices when managers have coefficients of absolute risk aversion that are increasing or decreasing in profit levels. Finally, in the equilibrium of a market for emissions rights with widespread noncompliance, risk aversion is associated with higher permit prices, better environmental quality, and lower aggregate violations.
Psychological Harm and Constitutional Standing

When do psychological or emotional harms count as “injury-in-fact” for the purposes of satisfying Article III standing requirements, and when should they? Courts have wrestled with whether to grant standing, for example, to family members of a man killed by the police who argued that as relatives of the deceased, they had suffered emotional pain; members of an animal-welfare organization who claimed they had undergone “sleeplessness, depression, and anger” when they were unable to visit an elephant at the zoo; and members of a Catholic organization who challenged a city resolution criticizing the Catholic Church’s stance on adoption by same-sex couples and contended that they had standing because they had experienced “spiritual or psychological harm.” Some have expressed the concern that recognizing psychological harm would sanction an unlimited expansion of constitutional standing. At the same time, established Article III injuries such as aesthetic and “spiritual” harm seem to contain psychological components. The legal standards for accepting psychological or emotional harm as injury-in-fact remain murky, even as the question of which kinds of harm plaintiffs must allege in order to enter federal court has become increasingly important. This article proposes and applies a framework by which courts can explicitly accept psychological harm as injury-in-fact while distinguishing in a principled way between cognizable and non-cognizable psychological harms. In doing so, this article and the accompanying appendix offer a detailed analysis of the current treatment of psychological harm in constitutional standing doctrine across geographical and temporal boundaries. This article’s approach enables the federal courts to acknowledge more fully citizens’ genuine experiences of harm without abandoning the restrictions on jurisdiction that Article III standing doctrine reflects.
Payment for order flow

Abstract We develop a dynamic model of price competition in broker and dealer markets. With no payment for order flow, a zero-profit equilibrium exists. With payment for order flow, spreads widen to more than compensate for this payment; hence, there is no equilibrium in which market makers earn zero profits. While brokerage commissions for market orders can fall, the total transactions cost to submitting a market order remains positive. Consumer and social welfare are both lower in any equilibrium with payment for order flow; payment for order flow redistributes payoffs from traders who demand liquidity to those who supply it.
On the political economy and limits of crisis insurance: the case of the 2008-11 bailouts

The bailouts of 2008–10 are the most recent in a long series of insurance-like policies designed to limit the losses of those harmed by a crisis of some kind—but enacted after a crisis is under way. This paper analyzes the economics and politics of “crisis insurance” programs. The analysis helps explain why ex-post insurance is popular, why it tends to be undersupplied by private markets, and why governments may be better able to provide it. The analysis also points out that there are limits to what losses can be covered. The routine adoption of new programs to limit losses from crises tends to require greater expenditures through time because of moral hazard problems and the nature of crises. Eventually, this trend may produce “uninsurable” crises. The analysis of this paper suggests that such problems can be moderated, although not eliminated, through appropriate standing polices for ex-post funding of crisis insurance.
The Differential Persistence of Accruals and Cash Flows for Future Operating Income versus Future Profitability

Prior research provides evidence that a higher proportion of accrued relative to cash earnings is associated with lower earnings performance in the subsequent fiscal year. The result has been widely interpreted as indicative of higher levels of operating accruals relative to cash flows foreshadowing a subsequent “earnings reversal,” and thus signaling earnings management. We note, however, that earnings performance in prior studies is typically defined as one-year-ahead operating income divided by one-year-ahead invested capital, or a measure of profitability. We find that accruals are more highly associated than cash flows with invested capital in the denominator of the profitability measure. In contrast, accruals and cash flows have no differential relation to one-year-ahead operating income. The evidence is not consistent with accruals having a reversal effect on earnings. This suggests that the lower persistence of accruals versus cash flows may not be due to earnings management but may rather be due to the effect of growth on future profitability.