cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Unregulable: Why Derivatives May Never Be Regulated

In this Article I explore various methods of regulating financial derivative contracts, including (a) regulation by judicially created case law, (b) regulation as gambling, (c) regulation as insurance, (d) regulation as securities, (e) regulation via a clearinghouse and (f) oversight by a super financial regulator. After discussing the drawbacks of each approach, I conclude that derivatives may be beyond the reach of the law, and indeed may be a trend whose prevalence rises and falls based only on the zeitgeist of society.
The Fair Value of Cash Flow Hedges, Future Profitability, and Stock Returns

The SEC and FASB recently expressed concerns that investors do not fully assimilate all of the information provided by complex and incomplete derivatives and other comprehensive income (OCI) disclosures. My evidence supports these concerns. Specifically, I examine the information content of unrealized cash flow hedge gains/losses for future profitability and stock returns. An unrealized gain on a cash flow hedge suggests that the price of the underlying hedged item (i.e., commodity price, foreign currency exchange rate, or interest rate) moved in a direction that will impair the firm's profits after the hedge expires. Consequently, I find that unrealized cash flow hedge gains/losses are negatively associated with future gross profit after the firm's existing hedges have expired. This association only holds after the firm has reclassified its hedges into earnings, and is weaker for firms that can pass input price changes on to their customers. Finally, investors do not immediately price the cash flow hedge information. Instead, investors appear surprised by future realizations of gross margin, consistent with the view that complex and incomplete disclosures delay pricing. These results are relevant to policymakers involved in the current FASB and IASB project designed to simplify the accounting and disclosure for derivatives and, in particular, cash flow hedges.
Strategic investment in a debt-bargaining framework

In this paper we analyze the strategic role of investment from a debtor country's perspective. The framework is one in which, if the debtor country is unable to meet debtor obligations, a bargaining regime determines the amount of debt repayment. In the context of a two-country real trade model, debt repayment is equal to the trade surplus of the debtor. The outcome of the bargaining game will therefore be dependent (among other things) on the level of production in the debtor country. The paper shows that productive investment may increase or decrease the bargaining power of the debtor country. This ambiguity appears to be fairly robust.
Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications

The “affective turn” presents a number of important challenges to law and the humanities. One such challenge concerns our ability to resist the temptation to romanticize the inhuman. Theorists from Nietzsche to Massumi have been so taken by the emancipatory promise of affective intensity that they risk relinquishing responsibility for freedom’s necessary social, political, and legal pre-conditions. Our responsibility for narrative construction and narrative choice carries with it an ethical imperative to understand the orchestration of affect. Downplaying the importance of reflective consciousness (including our capacity for prudent judgment) in favor of spontaneous affective events threatens to rob freedom of its meaning and open democratic societies to grave risks.
Maternal input choices and child cognitive development: testing for reverse causality

I assess whether the results of child achievement tests affect maternal employment and the child-care choices of mothers with prekindergarten children. To test this hypothesis, I use a quasi-struct...
China: Making an adversary

Commentators in the Western media, the United States Congress and academia are increasingly contending that China is on its way to becoming a threatening global force, an adversary, if not an enemy. This article examines whether those views are justified, after first establishing the importance of critically assessing all claims that a nation is turning into an adversary. The examination proceeds by summarizing the arguments of those who consider China an adversary in the making – the ‘adversarians’ – and the responses of those who hold China is leaning toward a peaceful development and should be engaged – the ‘engagers’. The discussion is organized into three segments, each analyzing the debate with regard to the different sectors of power: military/geopolitical, economic and ideational. The concluding sections explore alternative American responses to China's rising power in each of the three sectors.
Projects and Team Dynamics

I study a dynamic problem in which a group of agents collaborate over time to complete a project. The project progresses at a rate that depends on the agents' efforts, and it generates a pay-off upon completion. I show that agents work harder the closer the project is to completion, and members of a larger team work harder than members of a smaller team—both individually and on aggregate—if and only if the project is sufficiently far from completion. I apply these results to determine the optimal size of a self-organized partnership, and to study the manager's problem who recruits agents to carry out a project, and must determine the team size and its members' incentive contracts. The main results are: (i) that the optimal symmetric contract compensates the agents only upon completing the project; and (ii) the optimal team size decreases in the expected length of the project.
The Effect of Political Sensitivity and Bargaining Power on Taxes: Evidence from Federal Contractors

ABSTRACT: We investigate whether politically sensitive contractors pay higher taxes and whether their bargaining power reduces these tax costs. Using federal contractor data, we develop a new composite measure of political sensitivity that captures both the political visibility arising from federal contracts and the importance of federal contracts to the firm. We proxy for bargaining power using the firm-level proportion of contract revenues not subject to competition, the firm-level proportion of contract revenues arising from defense contracts, and industry-level concentration ratios. We find that politically sensitive firms pay higher federal taxes, all else equal. However, firms with greater bargaining power incur fewer tax-related political costs. Our study provides new evidence on the political cost hypothesis in a tax setting and the first evidence of the interactive effects of a firm's political sensitivity and bargaining power on tax-related political costs. JEL Classifications: M41; H26
The Waning Importance of Revisions to U.C.C. Article 2

Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code governs contracts for the sale of goods. This article seeks to show that, however urgent the need to modernize Article 2 was in 1990, this need ironically has waned with the passage of time. Article 2 requires less change now than it did a decade ago to meet the requirements of modern commerce. The article supports this claim by looking at three very significant developments that have occurred since 1990: the growth of electronic commerce, the decision not to address software licenses in article 2, and the accumulation of a decade of precedents addressing uncertain issues.
U.S. Economic Sensitivity to Weather Variability

To estimate the economic effects of weather variability in the United States, the authors define and measure weather sensitivity as the variability in economic output that is attributable to weather variability, accounting for changes in technology and changes in levels of economic inputs (i.e., capital, labor, and energy). Using 24 yr of economic data and weather observations, quantitative models of the relationship between state-level sectoral economic output and weather variability are developed for the 11 nongovernmental sectors of the U.S. economy; temperature and precipitation measures were used as proxies for all weather impacts. All 11 sectors are found to have statistically significant sensitivity to weather variability. Economic inputs were then constant and economic output was estimated in the 11 estimated sector models, varying the weather inputs only using 70 yr of historic weather observations. It was found that U.S. economic output varies by up to $485 billion yr−1 of 2008 gross domestic pr...
Balancing Expectations of Online Privacy: Why Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses Should Be Protected as Personally Identifiable Information

Although computer logs typically correlate online activity only to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, those addresses can be used to expose the individuals behind the computers. While various federal statutes protect similar data, such as telephone numbers and mailing addresses, as Personally Identifiable Information, federal privacy law does not sufficiently protect IP addresses. It has become commonplace for litigants to subpoena Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to unmask online speakers, and, because many ISPs have no reason to fight these subpoenas, they readily give up their subscribers’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, and other identifying data without demanding any court oversight or providing any notice to those identified. Left unchecked, such reporting could undermine free speech and the free exchange of ideas by encouraging users to censor their own online conduct. This Comment explores the possibility of protecting the IP address itself as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). It explores the various definitions of PII and the relevant technical aspects of IP addressing. It concludes that, despite some technical shortcomings, IP addresses are functionally similar to other types of PII and should be similarly protected in order to protect online privacy.
Do fraudulent firms produce abnormal disclosure

Abstract Using text-based analysis of 10-K MD&A disclosures, we find that fraudulent firms produce verbal disclosure that is abnormal relative to strong counterfactuals. This abnormal text predicts fraud out of sample, has a verbal factor structure, and can be interpreted to reveal likely mechanisms that surround fraudulent behavior. Using a conservative difference-based approach, we find evidence that fraudulent managers discuss fewer details explaining the sources of the firm's performance, while disclosing more information about positive aspects of firm performance. They also provide less content relating the disclosure to the managerial team itself. We also find new interpretable verbal support for the well-known hypothesis that managers commit fraud in order to artificially lower their cost of capital.
What Do We Really Know About the American Choice-of-Law Revolution?

* Stanford Law Fellow, Stanford Law School. The author would like to thank Norman Spaulding, Larry Kramer, Paul Berman, John Greenman, Brooke Coleman, and Nirej Sekhon for their insights and support. 1. Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws (1934). Conflicts of Law is a broad field that encompasses choice of law and other areas. However, choice-of-law scholars often use "conflicts" and "choice of law" interchangeably, and I do so as well in this Book Review.
The Irrelevance of Politics for Arbitrary and Capricious Review

This Article contends that, properly understood, judicial review of agency action under the reasoned decision-making standard precludes a court from considering political influence, but nonetheless allows an agency to consider it. It does so by identifying two fundamental attributes of such review, as courts have traditionally applied it, that have eluded scholarly focus and perhaps recognition altogether. The first attribute is that agency reasons, which are what courts review, are justifications rather than motivations for agency action. From this attribute, it follows that the irrelevance of politics for judicial review does not preclude politics as a legitimate agency consideration. The second attribute is that reasoned decision-making requires an agency to make manifest the tradeoffs generated by its action. This attribute facilitates political accountability by reducing barriers to public awareness of these tradeoffs. This Article argues that permitting an agency to credit politics as a justification for a rule would interfere with political accountability by relieving the agency of its obligation to reveal the full implications of its rulemaking. Thus, this Article promises to profoundly affect conceptions of the reasoned decision-making standard of review in general and how politics fits within it.
Handling the Failure of a Government-Sponsored Enterprise

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are huge, fast-growing, highly leveraged, lightly regulated, and susceptible to failure. Prudence calls for having a legal mechanism adequate for handling their failure. Yet no adequate insolvency mechanism currently exists for them. Unlike ordinary business firms, these government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) cannot liquidate or reorganize under the Bankruptcy Code. If Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac became sufficiently troubled, its regulator could appoint a conservator to take control of the firm and attempt to restore its financial health. But by then the firm's problems could well have become too severe for the conservator to resolve. The conservatorship statute provides no means for effectuating a reorganization and does not expressly authorize a liquidation. Uncertainty about the priority and process for handling creditors' claims could worsen the firm's problems and increase the risk of disrupting financial markets and eliciting a costly congressional rescue. By enacting a workable insolvency mechanism, Congress could avoid using public money or credit to rescue a troubled GSE's creditors. Congress should specify priorities among creditors' claims, authorize appointment of a receiver, and empower the receiver to reorganize the GSE or establish an interim firm to carry on the GSE's business. Alternatively, Congress could allow GSEs to liquidate or reorganize under the Bankruptcy Code.
Alternative Sustainability Criteria, Externalities, and Welfare in a Simple Agroecosystem Model: A Numerical Analysis

Using the numerical technique of value iteration, this paper imposes several sustainability constraints on a simple multi-sector agroecosystem model, and provides analysis of the costs tradeoffs of the product and externality is insufficient for intergenerationally equitable welfare paths, while sustaining a physical resource over time in the interests of equitability can result in a less equitable distribution of welfare across generations. Furthermore, a value sustainability constraint imposed on the social welfare maximization problem acts as a welfare transfer mechanism from the productive sector to the sector affected by the externality, but implies growth in profits for the productive sector and declining utility for the non-productive sector.
Feast or Famine: The Impact of the WTO Decision Favoring the U.S. Biotechnology Industry in the EU Ban of Genetically Modified Foods

Who do we trust to control the substances in our food and to make decisions about the safety of our food supply? Should it be the regulatory agencies in each individual nation, the health agencies of the international community, or the World Trade Organization (WTO)? In the ongoing controversy on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food, the divergent regulatory responses to scientific uncertainty and the unknown risks have reached a crescendo in the form of an international trade dispute. In May 2003, the United States, Argentina, and Canada filed a formal complaint with the WTO against the European Union (EU) over its fiveyear moratorium on approving crops engineered through biotechnology. The EU ban effectively excluded most U.S. agricultural products because its genetically modified (GM) crops are not segregated. The United States challenged the ban on the grounds that it is an impediment to trade. In
Trade Secret Enforcement After TianRui: Fighting Misappropriation Through the ITC

Trade secrets have historically been difficult to enforce, and enforcement is even more difficult for U.S. companies when the violations occur in foreign countries over which the United States may not have jurisdiction. China, for example, has rates of intellectual property (“IP”) infringement that are “among the highest in the world,” yet provides little recourse for foreign IP owners. Ineffective criminal regulations for IP infringement, as well as a lack of necessary judicial training and a tendency to award insufficient damages, make China a difficult forum in which to litigate. Even when a U.S. court enters a judgment against a Chinese company who misappropriated or infringed a U.S. company’s IP, “[t]he prospects are not promising for having a judgment entered by a U.S. court enforced by a court in China.” In a recent significant case, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the U.S. International Trade Commission’s (“ITC”) determination that the United States can block goods originating from a respondent that misappropriated trade secrets to make the items, even if the acts of misappropriation occurred entirely abroad and the misappropriated trade secrets are not being practiced by any U.S. entity. This avenue for blocking infringing products from entering the United States, based on the newly announced qualifications for a § 337 complaint, has increased the chances for domestic trade secret owners to meet the ITC’s jurisdictional requirements and prevail in an unfair competition investigation. Part II of this Note assesses the historical and modern landscape of trade secret enforcement. Section II.A lays out the unique traits of trade secrets that make them difficult to enforce, and Section II.B describes the functions and authority of the ITC that may make it a more viable forum than district courts for enforcing trade secret owners’ rights. Part III discusses the facts and significance of the Federal Circuit’s decision in TianRui v. USITC, in which the ITC and, subsequently, the Federal Circuit addressed two important questions of first impression — whether the ITC has authority over the unfair methods of competition caused by the alleged trade secret misappropriation occurring entirely abroad, and whether the importation of infringing goods would injure a domestic industry when the complainant was not using the trade secret domestically. Part IV analyzes the legal environment for trade secret enforcement after TianRui. Section IV.A provides a comparison of jurisdictional requirements for district courts versus the ITC, and Section IV.B compares the features and availability of remedies in these two different forums. Part V predicts that trade secret filings before the ITC will increase after TianRui due to the ITC’s liberal interpretation of the domestic industry requirement.
A STRONG COUPLING EXPANSION FOR N = 4 SYM THEORY AND OTHER SCFT's

Recent progress towards understanding a strong coupling expansion for various superconformal field theories in four dimensions is described. First, the case of the maximally supersymmetric Yang Mills theory is analyzed, as well as many calculations that can be done directly at strong coupling and matched to the AdS dual geometry. Also, this understanding is extended to other AdS duals where the sphere is replaced by a Sasaki-Einstein manifold. Particular emphasis is made on matching exactly part of the supergravity dual spectrum of various of these field theories by using wave function methods.
Implications of global warming: Two eras

Abstract Attempts to ponder meaningfully about the very long-term implications of global warming requires thinking about long-standing trends in other variables that would be expected to interact with climate change over time. One can envision two quite different “eras,” a first filled with considerable danger of both economic and environmental collapse. But—if humanity survives the first period—a second period of great promise for humanity and the global ecosystem is likely to emerge. The periods are discussed sequentially with an emphasis on the changing interactions among global climate, global population, international trade, population ageing, income growth and technological advance.
Supremacy and Diplomacy: The International Law of the U.S. Supreme Court

In 2003-2004, a Presidential campaign year dominated by debates about international affairs and international law, the U.S. Supreme Court took an unusual number of cases of international import. The Court considered the Alien Tort Claims Act and the future of human rights suits in U.S. courts, the applicability of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act to claims involving Nazi-stolen artwork, the applicability of American antitrust law to foreign anticompetitive activity, and the legality of the Guantanamo detentions. A great deal of ink has been spilled analyzing the individual impacts of each of these cases. What has been less considered is how these cases fit together and what, together, these cases can tell us about the Supreme Court’s nascent theories of international law.
Privacy-Preserving Script Sharing in GUI-based Programming-by-Demonstration Systems

An important concern in end user development (EUD) is accidentally embedding personal information in program artifacts when sharing them. This issue is particularly important in GUI-based programming-by-demonstration (PBD) systems due to the lack of direct developer control of script contents. Prior studies reported that these privacy concerns were the main barrier to script sharing in EUD. We present a new approach that can identify and obfuscate the potential personal information in GUI-based PBD scripts based on the uniqueness of information entries with respect to the corresponding app GUI context. Compared with the prior approaches, ours supports broader types of personal information beyond explicitly pre-specified ones, requires minimal user effort, addresses the threat of re-identification attacks, and can work with third-party apps from any task domain. Our approach also recovers obfuscated fields locally on the script consumer's side to preserve the shared scripts' transparency, readability, robustness, and generalizability. Our evaluation shows that our approach (1) accurately identifies the potential personal information in scripts across different apps in diverse task domains; (2) allows end-user developers to feel comfortable sharing their own scripts; and (3) enables script consumers to understand the operation of shared scripts despite the obfuscated fields.
Liberalizing Services Trade In APEC: A General Equilibrium Analysis with Imperfect Competition

The paper studies services-sector trade liberalization in the Asia–Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) Forum using a global, multicountry, multisector applied general equilibrium model with an imperfectly competitive service sector. Reducing the service sector’s nontariff barriers is modeled by eliminating the possibility for oligopolistic firms to price-discriminate between client countries within APEC and lowering the fixed costs of the firms doing service exporting business. The results suggest that services trade liberalization reinforces existing sectoral trade balances. Increase in demand for intermediate services tends to reinforce rather than counteract the role of primary factors in determining sectoral comparative advantage. The western APEC members received the greatest welfare gains from services trade liberalization, while the developing economies gained more if only tariffs were eliminated.
Earnings management and initial public offerings: The case of the depository industry

Abstract In a typical IPO, insiders are “net sellers” of IPO shares; however, in a demutualizing thrift, insiders are “net buyers” of IPO shares. Using a sample of mutual depository IPOs, we find evidence consistent with earnings management prior to the conversion of mutual thrifts. We find on average that mutuals report lower ROA and increased loan loss provisions and loan loss reserves in the period prior to the demutualization. Using a two-stage approach, we also find that the level of discretionary loan loss provisions and discretionary reserves are positively related to both the level of insider participation in the IPO and the first-day returns to investors. Our results are consistent with management of mutual thrifts benefiting at the conversion from reduced pre-IPO earnings and book equity resulting from earnings management.
How an Instrumental View of Law Corrodes the Rule of Law

Our legal tradition contains two fundamental pillars: the rule of law ideal, and an instrumental view of law. Although we take both for granted, in certain respects they are a mismatched pair. This article explores four specific points of tension between these two central streams of thought. The first two points relate primarily to legislative and executive actions, and the final two mainly to the judiciary. The first point focuses on the fact that the instrumental view of law came at the expense of the classical rule of law ideal that there are independent legal limits on law itself. The second point raises the implications of sharp disagreements over the common social good. The third point relates to the detrimental consequences on binding legal rules of purposive and pragmatic judicial reasoning oriented toward ends. The final point involves widespread doubts about the very possibility of judicial objectivity, doubts which undermine the notion of the rule of law. As the article demonstrates, these four points of tension raise critical problems that plague our contemporary legal culture. The ideas in this article are taken from a more exhaustive study of the implications of legal instrumentalism in modern law, published as Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law (Cambridge 2006).
Sponsored Search Auctions: Research Opportunities in Marketing

1. Introduction. 2. Introduction to Sponsored Search Auctions. 3. Internet Users 4. Advertisers. 5. Search Engines. 6. Conclusions. References.
The Labor Force Participation of Older Americans in 1900: Further Results

Abstract Data from the 1900 census are used to study the proper labor force classification of older male Americans experiencing 6 months or more of unemployment (the "long-term unemployed"). The evidence is consistent with the view that the older an individual was on entering the state of long-term unemployment, the greater the likelihood that he would leave the labor force in a short period of time. I conclude, however, that this is insufficient reason to exclude the long-term unemployed from the count of gainful workers in 1900, as has recently been advocated.
Commentary: The Extraordinary Revival of Dred Scott

In a widely reprinted 1987 speech, Justice Thurgood Marshall characterized the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford as accurately reflecting the Founders' views on many subjects, including race. The author argues that Dred Scott was dead wrong on almost all counts-as many contemporaneous commentators, including Abraham Lincoln, understood. It was not helpful to our understanding of history and constitutional law for Justice Marshall to have resuscitated this horribly misguided decision.
The impact of monetary policy on the exchange rate: evidence from three small open economies

This paper studies the impact effect of monetary policy shocks on the exchange rate in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand during the 1990s. Shocks are identified by the reaction of three month market interest rates to policy announcements that were not themselves endogenous to economic news on the same day. The main result is that a 100 basis point contractionary shock will appreciate the exchange rate by 2–3 percent on impact. The association of interest rate hikes with depreciations that is sometimes observed during periods of exchange market pressure is mainly attributable to reverse causality.
Regulation FD, accounting restatements and transient institutional investors’ trading behavior

Abstract We examine the impact of Regulation Fair Disclosure (RFD) on transient institutional investors’ abnormal trading behavior around accounting restatements. We find that while in the pre-RFD period, transient institutional investors exhibit abnormal selling of restating firms’ stocks one quarter before the restatement is publicly announced, in the post-RFD period there is no such abnormal selling. Furthermore, we find that this phenomenon is driven by (a) firms with low analyst following (i.e., firms with poor information environment), (b) firms with high stock price reaction to earnings surprise (i.e., firms with high informativeness of earnings), (c) firms where the restatements’ impact on earnings is high, and (d) firms with non-revenue related restatements.
Global Law Schools on U.S. Models: Emerging Models of Consensus-Based Internationalization or Markets-Based Americanization Models of Global Legal Education

This article examines two substantially irreconcilable approaches to internationalization that are emerging in the United States. The first focuses on globalizing the law school curriculum through internationalization. This approach is congruent with emerging trends in legal education internationalization in Europe. The second approaches internationalization as a market driven competition for influence among dominant domestic legal orders, that is, as nationalist globalization. Internationalization is understood as the extension of the influence of national law outside the national territory and is nicely illustrated by recent efforts to globalize the law school curriculum by internationalizing the conventional U.S. law school curriculum. The principle thesis is this: The global legal education community, led by the Europeans, has been constructing a vision of globalization of legal education that has as its basis the idea of harmonization and convergence of different systems and the development of a new institutional model grounded in harmonized global trends in law. The United States appears to be taking two approaches to this development. After an Introduction, Part II examines the internationalization efforts of U.S. law schools following one of five models: (1) integration; (2) segregation; (3) aggregation; (4) immersion; and (5) multi-disciplinary department models. This project seeks a newer framework for the construction of shared legal structures grounded in joint effort that is not dominated by the approaches off any one state. Part III then examines the ways in which American institutions are also working against this general trend by positing a form of nationalist globalization that has as its foundation the idea that national legal education can go global without globalizing the law taught. Nationalist globalization takes three forms: a focus on the training of lawyers for domestic service whose pedagogical methodologies can be exported, the extraterritorial extension of the U.S. law school system, and the management of post graduate degrees in law for foreign law graduates. In place of harmonization and globalization of law, the American nationalist globalization model grounded in extraterritorial competition for socialization in the laws of the domestic legal order of dominant states. The article ends with an analysis of the consequences of these competing forms of global engagement in legal education. While much of the attention on changes to the American law school environment has focused on internationalization within consensus-based and supplementary programs founded on the internationalization ideal, American law schools have also been developing market-based strategies that are, at their core, fundamentally inconsistent with the internationalization framework.
The Ugly Truth About Legal Academia

The Diversity in Legal Academia (DLA) project is the first formal, comprehensive, mixed-method empirical examination of the law faculty experience, utilizing an intersectional lens to investigate the personal and professional lives of legal academics. This Article reports on the first set of findings from that study, which I personally designed and implemented. DLA data reveal that ongoing privilege and institutional discrimination based on racism and sexism create distinct challenges for particular law faculty. Interactions between women of color law faculty and both their faculty colleagues and their students indicate persisting racial and gender privilege, resulting in ongoing bias. These findings cry out for law schools to intensify efforts at strengthening rather than de-emphasizing diversity, as many may be tempted to do during this period of great turmoil in legal education. In fact, law schools should provide greater institutional support to faculty, which will help not only those who are underrepresented, marginalized, and vulnerable, but all law faculty, law students, and the legal profession overall. This Article draws from both quantitative and qualitative data gathered from this national sample of law faculty to focus on the ways in which race, gender, and the combination of the two affect law faculty interactions with colleagues and students. It also proposes individual strategies and structural solutions that can be utilized in order for legal academia to live up to its full potential.
Rheology finds distinct glass and jamming transitions in emulsions

We study the rheology of monodisperse and bidisperse emulsions with various droplet sizes (1–2 μm diameter). Above a critical volume fraction ϕc, these systems exhibit solid-like behavior and a yield stress can be detected. Previous experiments suggest that for small thermal particles, rheology will see a glass transition at ϕc = ϕg ≈ 0.58; for large athermal systems, rheology will see a jamming transition at ϕc = ϕJ ≈ 0.64. However, simulations point out that at the crossover of thermal and athermal regimes, the glass and jamming transitions may both be observed in the same sample. Here we conduct an experiment by shearing four oil-in-water emulsions with a rheometer. We observe both a glass and a jamming transition for our smaller diameter droplets, and only a jamming transition for our larger diameter droplets. The bidisperse sample behaves similarly to the small droplet sample, with two transitions observed. Our rheology data are well-fit by both the Herschel–Bulkley model and the three component model. Based on the fitting parameters, our raw rheological data would not collapse onto a master curve. Our results show that liquid–solid transitions in dispersions are not universal, but depend on particle size.
A discussion of “Do managers use earnings guidance to influence street earnings exclusions?”

It is well known that both managers and analysts frequently define earnings by excluding various amounts from GAAP earnings. Christensen et al. (Rev Account Stud, 2011) make a prediction of causality whereby managers actively influence how analysts define earnings. They argue that the mechanism through which managers accomplish this is guidance of analysts’ earnings forecasts within a fiscal period. Using a large sample of firms actively followed by analysts, the authors examine whether the existence of earnings guidance is associated with higher levels of total exclusions in analysts’ definition of earnings. The study provides suggestive evidence that managers actively influence analysts’ definition of earnings that they forecast. However, the indirect nature of the research design calls for additional work to specifically link directed guidance of GAAP earnings exclusions to amounts actually excluded by analysts.
The Role of State Medical Boards In Regulating Physician Participation In Executions

The recent increase in calls for physician participation in lethal injection executions is likely to place a spotlight on state medical boards, the only entities empowered to discipline doctors for ethical violations. This article begins by recounting the history of physician participation in lethal injection executions, as well as the opposition of most medical professional organizations to the practice. The current state of the law suggests, however, that the role of state medical boards is quite circumscribed, at least in the majority of states with death penalty statutes that appear to contemplate some level of physician participation in executions. In order to further determine the legality of medical board action, a comprehensive study was conducted of the statutes and regulations governing state medical boards in all 50 states. The study reveals that only a handful of states – and only seven death-penalty states – explicitly incorporate the AMA’s ethical guidelines into their own state ethical codes. The article concludes by suggesting that, where doctors who participate in executions are doing so in order to relieve pain and suffering, it is not clear that a state medical board should intervene even in the rare instance when it would be legally possible to do so.
Open Source Development with a Commercial Complementary Product or Service

We examine optimal control decisions regarding pricing, network size, and hiring strategy in the context of open source software development. Opening the source code to a software product often implies that consumers would not pay for the software product itself. However, revenues may be generated from complementary products. A software firm may be willing to open the source code to its software if it stands to build a network for its complementary products. The rapid network growth is doubly crucial in open source development, in which the users of the firm's products are also contributors of code that translates to future quality improvements. To determine whether or not to open the source, a software firm must jointly optimize prices for its various products while simultaneously managing its product quality, network size, and employment strategy. Whether or not potential gains in product quality, network size, and labor savings are sufficient to justify opening the source code depends on product and demand characteristics of both the software and the complementary product, as well as on the cost and productivity of in-house developers relative to open source contributors. This paper investigates these crucial elements to allow firms to reach the optimal decision in choosing between the open and closed source models.
A Multistage Model of Loans and the Role of Relationships

We develop a multistage model of the loan granting process to understand the contradictory findings of the existing literature on bank-borrower relationships, credit availability, and loan rates. Upon estimating our model with the 1993, 1998, and 2003 versions of the Survey of Small Business Finances data set, we find that relationships matter in a borrower’s decision whether to apply for a loan and in the loan approval/rejection decision by the financial institution. However, the effect of relationships on loan rates depends on the prevailing economic climate. While firms with preexisting relationships obtain credit at lower rates during periods of economic expansion, loan rates are not negatively correlated with preexisting relationships during periods of economic recession.
"Private party direct access: A comparison of the NAFTA and the EU disciplines"

This paper will study the subject of locus standi of non-state actors within the dispute resolution regimes established by the EU and NAFTA. While NAFTA addresses the issue on a sectoral basis, the EU deals with it as an institutional and constitutional matter. The purpose of the paper is to juxtapose the different approaches and their solutions to the issue of the protection of the rights of private parties as devised in the two regional arrangements. The first part will discuss the nature of the two agreements and will focus on NAFTA as a regional agreement without institutions in comparison to the EU which represents an enterprise in regional integration equipped with powerful and authoritative institutions. The setting explained, I will elaborate on the concept of private party and follow with a general review of the choice of remedy (or the selection of dispute resolution mechanisms). Then, the distinction between direct versus non-direct access will be explored, for the main challenge to the private party's right to remedy arising from the inter- and supranational arrangements lies in this particular detail. Next, I will analyze the private party direct access to dispute resolution in NAFTA. Most relevant to this paper is the NAFTA Chapter 11 Section B dealing with dispute resolution regarding investments and the investor's right direct access. Dispute resolution and private party direct access in the EU will involve a discussion of the Community court system and of ART. 173 (4) of the EC treaty in particular. The paper will conclude with observations on the difference between NAFTA and the EU concerning approaches to private party direct access.
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Relative Position

there is no reason to think that the losers, in terms of relative position, had any entitlement to their antecedent relative position; and we are not, after all, speaking of redistribution from poor to rich. On distributional concerns and cost-benefit analysis, see various papers in Symposium, J. Legal Stud.
Media Endarkenment : A Comparative Analysis of 2012 Election Coverage in the United States and Russia

In this article, the author researches the coverage of the U.S. and Russian presidential campaigns of 2012 in terms of media endarkenment, a process of media influence that ultimately shrinks the potential for a vibrant public sphere where informed citizens debate crucial issues. Using the works of Herman and Chomsky as well as McQuail, the study reveals the methodology of a process of media influence (intended or unintended) by which both the intellectual level of the viewers and the number of informed citizens decrease. A textual analysis of election coverage by national TV channels of both countries uncovers some of the different forms that media endarkenment takes, including the construction of a false reality, intimidation, and simplification.
Who's Afraid of Unenumerated Rights?

Unenumerated rights are expressly protected against federal infringement by the original meaning of the Ninth Amendment and against state infringement by the original meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite this textual recognition, unenumerated rights have received inconsistent and hesitant protection ever since these provisions were enacted, and what protection they do receive is subject to intense criticism. In this essay, I examine why some are afraid to enforce unenumerated rights. While this reluctance seems most obviously to stem from the uncertainty of ascertaining the content of unenumerated rights, I contend that underlying this concern are more basic assumptions about legislative sovereignty and the proper role of judges. I explain why a proper conception of constitutional legitimacy requires that unenumerated rights be protected somehow, that judicial protection is not as problematic as commonly thought once it is acknowledged that all liberty may be reasonably regulated (as opposed to prohibited), and that we need to ascertain the scope of unenumerated rights only to identify wrongful behavior that may be prohibited altogether because it invariably violates the rights of others.
Lotteries, Group Size and Public Good Provision

We analyze the effect of group size on public good provision under the Morgan (2000) lottery mechanism. For a pure public good, the lottery performs quite well as public good provision is found to increase in group size, even when the lottery prize is held constant. By contrast, for fully rival public goods, per capita provision is found to decrease in group size, even when the lottery prize is proportional to group size. Further, the per capita level of provision will approach zero when group size is sufficiently large.
Index Membership and Small Firm Financing

This paper investigates the extent to which index membership affects small firm financing. Using a regression discontinuity specification around the lower cutoff of the Russell 2000 small-cap index...
Do all constructive strongly monotone inter-temporal orders exhibit impatience?

Abstract In this paper we show that if a strongly monotone inter-temporal order exhibits no preference towards the advancement of timing of future utility on any infinite utility stream, then the existence of such an order must involve some non-constructive device.
Absenteeism and Measures of Job Performance: A Meta‐Analysis

The correlations reported in the extant literature between one form of counterproductive behaviors ‐ absenteeism ‐ and four different indices of job performance were meta-analytically cumulated. Job performance indices utilized were productivity, quality, interpersonal behaviors, and effort. The former two were measured using organizational records, while the latter two were measured using supervisory ratings. The results suggest that absenteeism measures are more highly correlated with organizational records of quality, and supervisory ratings of both effort and interpersonal behaviors. Lower correlations were found with organizational records of productivity. These results suggest the potential for common determinants of absenteeism and some aspects of job performance. The fairly independent literatures that have developed on absenteeism and job performance can inform one another. Implications for modeling and assessing job performance are noted.
A Prequel to Law and Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript of Harold J. Berman Comes to Light

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the intense legal positivist era during which he was writing. This essay contextualizes Berman's Law and Language within the development of his own legal thought and in the evolution of interdisciplinary legal studies. It focuses particularly on the themes of law and religion, law and history, and law and communication that dominated Berman's writing until his death in 2007.
Blind Queues: The Impact of Consumer Beliefs on Revenues and Congestion

In many service settings, customers have to join the queue without being fully aware of the parameters of the service provider (e.g., customers at checkout counters may not know the true service rate before joining). In such “blind queues,” customers make their joining/balking decisions based on limited information about the service provider’s operational parameters (from past service experiences, reviews, etc.) and queue lengths. We analyze a firm serving customers making decisions under arbitrary beliefs about the service parameters in an observable queue for a service with a known price. By proposing an ordering for the balking threshold distributions in the customer population, we are able to compare the effects of customer beliefs on the queue. We show that, although revealing the service information to customers improves revenues under certain conditions, it may destroy consumer welfare or social welfare. Given a market size, consumer welfare can be significantly reduced when a fast server announces...