cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
An interpretable deep-learning model for early prediction of sepsis in the emergency department.

Summary Sepsis is a life-threatening condition with high mortality rates and expensive treatment costs. Early prediction of sepsis improves survival in septic patients. In this paper, we report our top-performing method in the 2019 DII National Data Science Challenge to predict onset of sepsis 4 h before its diagnosis on electronic health records of over 100,000 unique patients in emergency departments. A long short-term memory (LSTM)-based model with event embedding and time encoding is leveraged to model clinical time series and boost prediction performance. Attention mechanism and global max pooling techniques are utilized to enable interpretation for the deep-learning model. Our model achieved an average area under the curve of 0.892 and was selected as one of the winners of the challenge for both prediction accuracy and clinical interpretability. This study paves the way for future intelligent clinical decision support, helping to deliver early, life-saving care to the bedside of septic patients.
"They Use It Like Candy": how the Prescription of Psychotropic Drugs to State-Involved Children Violates International Law

The prescription of psychotropic drugs to children in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. Children in state foster care systems and juvenile prisons are particularly at risk of overmedication with psychotropic drugs. On any given day up to 50% of children in some state foster care systems and juvenile prisons are administered psychotropic drugs, often without documentation or medical justification supporting their use and under conditions that constitute egregious departures from sound medical practice. The 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances established an international monitoring and control system to protect the public - including children in state custody - from dangers associated with psychotropic drugs. Despite the United States signing this treaty, this Article concludes that the government has violated international law in three significant ways: by failing to prohibit direct-to-consumer advertising in direct violation of the Convention’s explicit prohibition of advertising, by failing to ensure that the drugs are prescribed for legitimate “medical purposes” only, rather than used for non-medical conditions, such as chemical restraints for state-involved children, and by failing to administer psychotropic drugs in accordance with sound medical practices.These violations have resulted in the unconscionable rise in unwarranted prescription and inappropriate administration of psychotropic drugs to children in state foster care systems and juvenile prisons in the U.S. This Article calls on the United States government to implement regulations and other appropriate measures to ensure compliance with its international legal obligation to protect state-involved children from non-medically-justified administration of psychotropic drugs.
Bank Regulation and Supervision: What Works Best?

The authors draw on their new database on bank regulation and supervision in 107 countries to assess different governmental approaches to bank regulation and supervision and evaluate the efficacy of different regulatory and supervisory policies. First, the authors assess two broad and competing theories of government regulation: the helping-hand approach, according to which governments regulate to correct market failures, and the grabbing-hand approach, according to which governments regulate to support political constituencies. Second, they assess the effect of an extensive array of regulatory and supervisory policies on the development and fragility of the banking sector. These policies include the following: Regulations on bank activities and the mixing of banking and commerce. Regulations on entry by domestic and foreign banks. Regulations on capital adequacy. Design features of deposit insurance systems. Supervisory power, independence, and resources; stringency of loan classification; provisioning standards; diversification guidelines; and powers to take prompt corrective action. Regulations governing information disclosure and fostering private sector monitoring of banks. Government ownership of banks. The results raise a cautionary flag with regard to reform strategies that place excessive reliance on a country's adherence to an extensive checklist of regulatory and supervisory practices that involve direct government oversight of and restrictions on banks. The findings, which are much more consistent with the grabbing-hand view of regulation than with the helping-hand view, suggest that the regulatory and supervisory practices most effective in promoting good performance and stability in the banking sector are those that force accurate information disclosure, empower private sector monitoring of banks, and foster incentives for private agents to exert corporate control.
Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in Private Health Insurance

Moral hazard and adverse selection create inefficiencies in private health insurance markets. We use claims data from a largerm to study the independent roles of both moral hazard and adverse selection. Previous studies have attempted to estimate moral hazard in private health insurance by assuming that individuals respond only to the spot price, end-of-year price, average price, or a related metric. There is little economic justication for such assumptions and, in fact, economic intuition suggests that the nonlinear budget constraints generated by health insurance plans make these assumptions especially poor. We study the differential impact of the health insurance plans offered by therm on the entire distribution of medical expenditures without parameterizing the plans by a specic metric. We use a new instrumental variable quantile estimation technique introduced in Powell (2013b) that provides the quantile treatment effects for each plan, while conditioning on a set of covariates for identi- �cation purposes. This technique allows us to map the resulting estimated medical expenditure distributions to the nonlinear budget sets generated by each plan. Our method also allows us to separate moral hazard from adverse selection and estimate their relative importance. We estimate that 79% of the additional medical spending observed in the most generous plan in our data relative to the least generous is due to adverse selection. The remainder can be attributed to moral hazard. A policy which resulted in each person enrolling in the least generous plan would cause the annual premium of that plan to rise by over $1,600.
Messages from market to management: the case of IPOs

Abstract An IPO's initial return contains new information about the true value of the firm and, hence, provides vital feedback for the investment decision. A high initial return encourages managers to expand, while a lower than expected post-IPO price leads to a reduction of the capital budget. Information production by market participants increases the precision of the market feedback captured in the first competitively determined stock price. Managers can entice investors to produce more information by selling larger stakes at lower prices. A too low offer price, however, attracts uninformed investors and decreases information production.
What Do We (and Others) Mean by “The Terms of Trade”?

Abstract. I explore how the concept of “the terms of trade” has been used since Alfred Marshall coined it. Early writers (Taussig, Viner, Dorrance) constructed variations on the relative price of traded goods that Marshall was concerned with, but most of these variations have been left behind in modern uses of the term, which today almost always refer to a relative price of exports and imports. However, when authors have wanted to identify the terms of trade with a particular country and to represent it either symbolically in an economic model or empirically, they have had to choose between defining the terms of trade as the relative price of exports or the relative price of imports. The first to do this was Taussig, who chose the second option, but he was followed by Viner who chose the first, and Viner was followed in this choice by almost all writers for the next several decades. Then, around 1980, Taussig’s choice came back into fashion among scholars of international finance. I document this contrast in definitions between international trade and international finance, then add slightly to Viner’s argument for preferring that the terms of trade of a country be defined as the relative price of its exports. Keywords. Terms of trade. JEL. F10.
The cost of financial flexibility: Evidence from share repurchases

Over the last two decades, share repurchases have emerged as the dominant payout channel, offering a more flexible means of returning excess cash to investors. However, little is known about the costs associated with payout-related financial flexibility. Using a unique identification strategy, we document a significant cost. We find that actual repurchase investments underperform hypothetical investments that mechanically smooth repurchase dollars through time by approximately two percentage points per year on average. This cost of financial flexibility is correlated with earnings management, managerial entrenchment, and less institutional monitoring.
The main problem with USC libertarianism

Libertarians like Robert Kane believe that indeterminism is necessaryfor free will. They think this in part because they hold both (1) thatmy being the ultimate cause of at least part of myself is necessary forfree will and (2) that indeterminism is necessary for this ``ultimateself-causation''. But seductive and intuitive as this ``USCLibertarianism'' may sound, it is untenable. In the end, nometaphysically coherent (not to mention empirically valid) conception ofultimate self-causation is available. So the basic intuition motivatingthe USC Libertarian is ultimately impossible to fulfill.
Estimation in the continuous time mover‐stayer model with an application to bond ratings migration

The usual tool for modelling bond ratings migration is a discrete, time-homogeneous Markov chain. Such model assumes that all bonds are homogeneous with respect to their movement behaviour among rating categories and that the movement behaviour does not change over time. However, among recognized sources of heterogeneity in ratings migration is age of a bond (time elapsed since issuance). It has been observed that young bonds have a lower propensity to change ratings, and thus to default, than more seasoned bonds. The aim of this paper is to introduce a continuous, time-non-homogeneous model for bond ratings migration, which also incorporates a simple form of population heterogeneity. The specific form of heterogeneity postulated by the proposed model appears to be suitable for modelling the effect of age of a bond on its propensity to change ratings. This model, called a mover–stayer model, is an extension of a Markov chain. This paper derives the maximum likelihood estimators for the parameters of a continuous time mover–stayer model based on a sample of independent continuously monitored histories of the process, and develops the likelihood ratio statistic for discriminating between the Markov chain and the mover–stayer model. The methods are illustrated using a sample of rating histories of young corporate issuers. For these issuers the default probabilities predicted by the Markov chain and mover–stayer models are different. In particular for 1–4 years old bonds the mover–stayer model estimates substantially lower default probabilities from rating C than a Markov chain. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Equilibrium Labor Market Search and Health Insurance Reform

We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk-averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage dec...
Origin Myths, Contracts, and the Hunt for Pari Passu

We use interviews with corporate lawyers and a data set of contracts to explore an elite area of legal practice: sovereign bond lending. Sovereign debt lawyers work at prestigious global law firms, yet the contracts they produce include some terms that defy explanation. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, we explore two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, we demonstrate that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause's origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. We probe this disjuncture between the myths and lawyers' actual practices and explore why contracts origin myths might hold such appeal for this elite segment of the bar.
Regulatory competition and forbearance: Evidence from the life insurance industry

Regulatory separation theory indicates that a system with multiple regulators leads to less forbearance and limits producer gains while a model of banking regulation developed by Dell’Ariccia and Marquez (2006) predicts the opposite. Fragmented regulation of the US life insurance industry provides an especially rich environment for testing the effects of regulatory competition. We find positive relations between regulatory competition and profitability measures for this industry, which is consistent with the Dell’Ariccia and Marquez model. Our results have practical implications for the debate over federal versus state regulation of insurance and financial services in the US.
Accounting Information, Disclosure, and the Cost of Capital

In this paper we examine whether and how accounting information about a firm manifests in its cost of capital, despite the forces of diversification. We build a model that is consistent with the Capital Asset Pricing Model and explicitly allows for multiple securities whose cash flows are correlated. We demonstrate that the quality of accounting information can influence the cost of capital, both directly and indirectly. The direct effect occurs because higher quality disclosures affect the firm's assessed covariances with other firms' cash flows, which is nondiversifiable. The indirect effect occurs because higher quality disclosures affect a firm's real decisions, which likely changes the firm's ratio of the expected future cash flows to the covariance of these cash flows with the sum of all the cash flows in the market. We show that this effect can go in either direction, but also derive conditions under which an increase in information quality leads to an unambiguous decline in the cost of capital.
The Lawyer’s Monopoly—What Goes and What Stays

We live in a time of unprecedented changes for American lawyers, probably the greatest changes since the Great Depression. That period saw the creation of the lawyer’s monopoly through a series of regulatory modifications. Will we see the same following the Great Recession? Formally, no. This Article predicts that formal lawyer regulation in 2023 will look remarkably similar to lawyer regulation in 2013. This is because lawyer regulators will not want to rock the boat in the profession or in law schools during a time of roil. Informally, yes! We are already seeing a combination of computerization, outsourcing, and nonlawyer practice radically reshape the market for law from one that centers on individualized, hourly work done for clients to a market of much cheaper, commoditized legal products. This trend will accelerate over time. The upshot? Formal lawyer regulation will continue on with little change, but will cover an ever-shrinking proportion of the market for legal services.
A Nonparametric Prewhitened Covariance Estimator

This paper proposes a new nonparametric spectral density estimator for time series models with general autocorrelation. The conventional nonparametric estimator that uses a positive kernel has mean squared error no better than n−4/5. We show that the best implementation of our estimator has mean squared error of order n−8/9, provided there is sufficient smoothness present in the spectral density. This is, of course, achieved by bias reduction; however, unlike most other bias reduction methods, like the kernel method with higher-order kernels, our procedure ensures a positive definite estimate. Our method is a generalization of the well-known prewhitening method of spectral estimation; we argue that this can best be interpreted as multiplicative bias reduction. Higher-order expansions for the proposed estimator are derived, providing an improved bandwidth choice that minimizes the mean squared error to the second order. A simulation study shows that the recommended prewhitened kernel estimator reduces bias and mean squared error in spectral density estimation.
Ignoring) the Prosperity Playbook

ABSTRACTWhy are some countries poor? It comes down to good governance: secure property rights and policies that reduce transaction costs. In turn, this means the rule of law: limits on executive authority and a government that impartially enforces contracts, and thus abstains from picking winners. It also means a government that solves market failures. Yet the governments of developing countries often do the opposite. The proximate reasons are the endurance of state monopolies, policies that cripple the rural sector, and an over-dependence on natural resources. The deeper reason is rulers’ need to raise revenues in short order to survive.
Regulating Electronic Legal Support Across State and National Boundaries

Technology and globalization are changing the practice of law and creating new challenges for lawyer regulation. Middle-class litigants who struggle to afford legal services — but are comfortable using online resources — are increasingly seeking and finding legal support online. State and national boundaries dissolve in the online marketplace, making it easy for attorneys to provide services to litigants in other jurisdictions. Differences in national economies make it cost effective for both clients and lawyers to engage in transnational practice, so that attorneys in India and other jurisdictions can offer legal support and advice to American litigants for as little as $22 an hour, and paraprofessionals for less than $10 an hour — significantly less than the $150-an-hour billing floor found in many U.S. jurisdictions. The growing globalization of online legal services suggests that bar regulators who truly want to protect the public will have to become more open to onshore computer-assisted legal services. This article, prepared for the University of Akron’s Miler-Becker Symposium “Navigating the Practice of Law in the Wake of Ethics 20/20: Globalization, New Technologies, and What it Means to be a Lawyer in These Uncertain Times,” argues that these changing practices will require significant collaboration between online legal service providers and bar regulatory officials. This relationship, however, has not always been a good one. Many jurisdictions have only reluctantly allowed attorneys to provide limited representation to pro se litigants, and states have objected even more forcefully to electronic legal assistance, charging companies like LegalZoom under laws prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law. These efforts, though aimed at the protecting the public, also contain an element of protectionism — and the line between protecting the public and protecting lawyers’ economic livelihoods is not an easy one to draw.Nevertheless, there is room for collaboration: both legal regulators and the online intermediaries that facilitate lawyer-client connections would benefit from identifying and excluding harmful or fraudulent actors. It is true that individual clients may not be able to evaluate the quality of the legal services they have been provided. After all, the very theory of lawyer regulation is founded on the notion that clients cannot themselves evaluate the quality of the professional they hire, and so the market cannot ensure a base level of quality — regulation must do that. But in the aggregate, some of the online services call that assumption into question. By crowdsourcing and publicizing a wealth of information about legal service providers’ job history and client satisfaction, these sites offer prospective clients a much more effective way to evaluate potential attorneys. Although regulatory officials are unlikely to be able to stem the flood of online legal service providers, they can also use these pre-existing informational networks to assist in their public protection efforts.
Elusive Equality: Reflections on Justice Field’s Opinions in Chae Chan Ping and Fong Yue Ting

For immigration scholars, Justice Field is perhaps best remembered for his majority opinion in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Chinese exclusion, and credited for introducing the plenary power doctrine to immigration law. Yet, despite the opinion’s xenophobic rhetoric reflecting his personal views of the Chinese, Justice Field dissented in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, reasoning that, once they became lawful residents, the Chinese were entitled to be treated as equals under the law regardless of citizenship, a position supported by his earlier federal circuit court opinion in Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan.Regardless of one’s particular views of his opinions in these cases, it appears Field sought to balance his unfavorable personal and political views about mass Chinese immigration against his duty as a federal judge to uphold the constitutional rights of individual persons within the United States, regardless of their race and citizenship, before Congress’s plenary power. This tension between viewing immigrants as an undifferentiated mass and recognizing each immigrant as a person worthy of constitutional protection pervades contemporary debates regarding immigration today.Further, research in social psychology suggests that, within immigration policy, seldom will personhood trump membership as an organizing principle when benefiting noncitizen outsiders is perceived to come at the expense of U.S. citizen insiders. Put another way, immigration law presumes differences among citizens and noncitizens and creates others among noncitizens; thus, while it is already difficult to extend the circle of empathy beyond family and friends to strangers, it is particularly difficult to do so within a field like immigration law, which is designed to maintain boundaries between citizen and “alien.” Nonetheless, recognizing and working within these constraints, immigrant rights advocates would do well to emphasize and guard against our inherent parochialism, as Field appeared to do in Fong notwithstanding his opinion in Chae.
Introduction: Working Group on the Future of Systemic Disparate Treatment Law

This brief essay introduces four articles on Title VII’s systemic disparate treatment theory in the wake of Wal-Mart v. Dukes. I argue that the core difficulty is to combine a robust account of systemic discrimination with a clear connection to the paradigm of disparate treatment in individual cases. Two intuitive, yet quite different, concepts that do so are what I call “connective” and “dispersed” disparate treatment. Connective disparate treatment occurs when employees’ race or sex affects the employer’s company-wide decisionmaking about organizational practices; those practices - at the extreme, a policy requiring disparate treatment - connect together individual employment decisions into a systemic pattern. In contrast, dispersed disparate treatment occurs whenever there is disparate treatment in large numbers of individual employment decisions, regardless of whether there is any company-wide connective practice. Wal-Mart erects a formidable procedural barrier to dispersed disparate treatment claims, yet limiting systemic claims to connective disparate seems unduly narrow and contradicts the Court’s prior jurisprudence. The way forward lies in a theory that grounds liability in an employer’s connective practices, yet does not require that those practices themselves constitute disparate treatment. Instead, employers must be held responsible for connective practices when they enable individual disparate treatment to take root and proliferate. Doing so requires developing accounts of negligence or strict liability that conceptualize discrimination more broadly, as we recently have seen in the hostile work environment context.
Head–tail clouds: drops to probe the diffuse Galactic halo

A head–tail high-velocity cloud (HVC) is a neutral hydrogen halo cloud that appears to be interacting with the diffuse halo medium as evident by its compressed head trailed by a relatively diffuse tail. This paper presents a sample of 116 head–tail HVCs across the southern sky (d < 2°) from the H i Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS) HVC catalogue, which has a spatial resolution of 15.5 arcmin (45 pc at 10 kpc) and a sensitivity of cm−2 (5σ). 35 per cent of the HIPASS compact and semi-compact HVCs (CHVCs and:HVCs) can be classified as head–tail clouds from their morphology. The clouds have typical masses of 730 M⊙ at 10 kpc (26 000 M⊙ at 60 kpc) and the majority can be associated with larger HVC complexes given their spatial and kinematic proximity. This proximity, together with their similar properties to CHVCs and:HVCs without head–tail structure, indicates the head–tail clouds have short lifetimes, consistent with simulation predictions. Approximately half of the head–tail clouds can be associated with the Magellanic System, with the majority in the region of the Leading Arm with position angles pointing in the general direction of the movement of the Magellanic System. The abundance in the Leading Arm region is consistent with this feature being closer to the Galactic disc than the Magellanic Stream and moving through a denser halo medium. The head–tail clouds will feed the multi-phase halo medium rather than the Galactic disc directly and provide additional evidence for a diffuse Galactic halo medium extending to at least the distance of the Magellanic Clouds.
Tea Party Influence A Story of Activists and Elites

Understanding how the Tea Party has affected congressional elections and roll call voting helps us understand not only an important political movement, but how movements affect politics more genera...
Cash Flow Sensitivity of Investment

Investment cash flow sensitivity is associated with both underinvestment when cash flows are low and overinvestment when cash flows are high. The accessibility of external capital is positively correlated with cash flows, intensifying investment cash flow sensitivity. Managers actively counteract the variations in internal and external liquidity by accumulating working capital when liquidity is high and draining it when liquidity is low. These results imply that cash flow sensitive firms face financial constraints, which are binding in low cash flow years. Traditional indicators of financial constraints, such as size and dividend payout, successfully distinguish firms that may potentially face constraints, but are less successful in distinguishing between periods of tight and relaxed constraints. These periods are much more clearly separated by the KZ index, which, on the other hand, is less successful in identifying firms that are likely to face liquidity constraints.
Explaining State Commitment to the International Criminal Court: Strong Enforcement Mechanisms As a Credible Threat

This article examines the puzzle of state commitment to the International Criminal Court. It asks why some 100 states would join an international human rights treaty like the ICC treaty which has relatively strong enforcement mechanisms to punish bad and noncompliant behavior. After all, by joining the ICC, states agree that an independent prosecutor may try the state’s own nationals for mass atrocities should the ICC conclude the state is unwilling or unable to do so domestically. Thus, although states regularly join the many international human rights treaties that only require states to self-report compliance, I theorize that states will view the ICC’s enforcement mechanisms as a credible threat and will be more likely to commit only if calculations about the ability to comply with treaty terms show that commitment will not lead to a significant sovereignty loss. In this case, states should consider (1) the strength of the anticipated enforcement mechanism and (2) the state’s ability to comply with the terms of the ICC treaty. I test this argument empirically and find support for the credible threat theory. In contrast to prior studies empirically examining state commitment to international human rights treaties, I find that states with poorer human rights practices are less likely than states with good practices to commit to the ICC. I conclude that although this means that member states tend to have relatively good human rights practices, the ICC and its relatively strong enforcement mechanisms can still positively influence state behavior. Indeed, the ICC is uniquely situated to improve international cooperation on human rights matters since it has been designed so that commitment requires compliance. All states that have joined the court – including those with poor practices – will have to comply or face sovereignty losses.
The Role of Similar Accounting Standards in Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions

This study investigates whether differences in accounting standards across countries create information costs that inhibit firms from investing in foreign markets. Using the frequency and dollar magnitude of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from 32 countries over the period 1998-2004, we find that the aggregate volume of M&A activity across country pairs is larger for pairs of countries with similar Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ( GAAP), and that this increased volume of M&A activity is driven by target countries that also have strong enforcement. We also find that the 2005 mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standard ( IFRS) attracted more cross-border M&As among IFRS-adopting countries, and that this increase in M&A activity within the IFRS countries is more pronounced for country pairs with low similarity in GAAP in the pre- IFRS adoption period. Overall, our results highlight the role of accounting standards and enforcement in shaping cross-border M&A activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines

Abstract We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms subsequently damped entrepreneurship across several generations. Proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with reduced entrepreneurship for cities in the 1970s and onward in industries unrelated to mining. We use historical mines as an instrument for our modern entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth.
Perpetual Conservation Easements in the 21st Century: What Have We Learned and Where Should We Go From Here?

The public is investing billions of dollars in conservation easements, which now protect an estimated 40 million acres throughout the United States. But all is not well. Uncertainties in the law and abusive practices threaten to undermine public confidence in and the effectiveness of the conservation easement as a land protection tool. On February 15, 2013, the Wallace Stegner Center at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law sponsored a conference at which these issues were explored, with the goal of helping to minimize abuses and ensure that conservation easements will actually provide the promised conservation benefits to the public over the long term.
CEO Compensation and Corporate Risk: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

Our paper sheds new light on the theoretically ambiguous effect of stock options on managerial incentives for risk-taking by analyzing how equity-based incentives affect firms’ responses to an unanticipated and exogenous increase in risk. The particular risk we study is an increase in liability and regulatory risk arising from workers’ exposure to newly identified carcinogens. We find that compensation contracts with high sensitivity to stock prices, low sensitivity to volatility, and options that are deep in-the-money reduce managers’ risk-taking incentives after risk increases. While options increase compensation’s sensitivity to both stock prices and volatility, on net, they encourage risk taking in our setting. We find that variation in managerial stock and option holdings causes meaningful differences in corporate decisions. Our findings underline the importance of corporate boards structuring and maintaining compensation plans properly in order to achieve their desired corporate strategy.
Restricting Testamentary Freedom: Ex Ante Versus Ex Post Justifications

The organizing principle of American succession law — testamentary freedom — gives decedents a nearly unrestricted right to dispose of property. After surveying the justifications for testamentary freedom, I examine the circumstances in which it may be socially beneficial for courts to alter wills, trusts, and other gratuitous transfers at death: imperfect information, negative externalities, and intergenerational equity. These justifications correspond with many existing limitations on the freedom of testation. Yet, disregarding donor intent to maximize the donees’ ex post interests, an increasingly common justification for intervention, is socially undesirable. Doing so ignores important ex ante considerations, including a donor’s happiness, a donor’s incentive to work, save, and invest, and the structure and timing of a donor’s gifts. If donors believe courts may not facilitate their intent, donors may be less happy, accumulate less property, and alter gifts during life. Moreover, because the law often affects donor behavior, ignoring donative intent to benefit particular donees may harm not only the donors but also donees as a class. Thus, the living may themselves benefit if the law allows a certain degree of “dead hand” control.
The Role of Perceived Variability and the Health Halo Effect in Nutritional Inference and Consumption

When information is missing or unknown, consumers often form nutritional inferences based on perceived attribute variability across brands. Four experiments show that less favorable nutritional inferences are formed when perceived attribute variability is high as opposed to low. This effect occurs when two attributes differing in perceived variability are presented or when the attribute is held constant and perceived variability is manipulated through priming. However, this effect is reduced when a health halo label is present as opposed to absent. Furthermore, the presence of a health halo label increases the amount of a product that is actually consumed when perceived attribute variability is high (vs. low) and when consumers learn from experience. Together, the results suggest that perceived attribute variability and the health halo effect jointly influence inference and behavior.
Scale and Scope Effects on Advertising Agency Costs

Economies of scale are evident when a firm's average costs decline while its output expands, as when an advertising agency raises its gross income by serving more accounts and/or larger accounts. Economies of scope appear when cost savings can be realized by a single agency producing several products jointly, as compared to many agencies each producing them separately. How important are economies of scale and scope in advertising agency operations? In this paper cost models are formulated which represent how the principal component of agency costs, employment level, varies according to the mix of media and services an agency provides and the total volume of advertising it produces. These models are estimated and tested cross-sectionally utilizing data pertaining to the domestic operations of 401 U.S. agencies for 1987. The empirical evidence reported here indicates that both scale and particularly scope economies are highly significant in the operations of U.S. advertising agencies. We find that of the 12,000 establishments comprising the industry in 1987, approximately 200-250 had domestic gross incomes of $3-4 million or more or equivalently, billings of $20-27 million and therefore had service mixes and operating levels sufficiently large to take full advantage of all available size-related efficiencies. Furthermore, the overall structure of the industry is one where these large, fully efficient firms created and produced more than half of all the national advertising utilized in the U.S. during 1987. At the same time, vast numbers of very small agencies appear to operate with substantial cost disadvantages compared to large firms as a consequence of these scale and scope economies. These findings carry important implications concerning possible future changes in the industry structure. It seems highly doubtful that scale economies could motivate further mergers among the largest 200-250 agencies. On the other hand, for small agencies, mergers and acquisitions might be attractive as means of mitigating their size-related cost disadvantages. Finally, our findings demonstrating the existence of scale and scope economies are consistent with the diminishing reliance on fixed rates of media commissions as the principal basis of agency compensation. They also cast strong doubts on size-related economies in operating costs as a viable explanation for the limited degree of vertical integration of agency services by large advertisers.
The Effects of Executives on Corporate Tax Avoidance

ABSTRACT: This study investigates whether individual top executives have incremental effects on their firms’ tax avoidance that cannot be explained by characteristics of the firm. To identify executive effects on firms’ effective tax rates, we construct a data set that tracks the movement of 908 executives across firms over time. Results indicate that individual executives play a significant role in determining the level of tax avoidance that firms undertake. The economic magnitude of the executive effects on tax avoidance is large. Moving between the top and bottom quartiles of executives results in approximately an 11 percent swing in GAAP effective tax rates; thus, executive effects appear to be an important determinant in firms’ tax avoidance.
Understanding china's economic performance

Broadly speaking, two schools of thought have emerged to interpret China's rapid growth since 1978: the experimentalist school and the convergence school. The experimentalist school attributes China's successes to the evolutionary, experimental, and incremental nature of China's reforms. Specifically, the resulting non-capitalist institutions are claimed to be successful in (a) agriculture where land is not owned by the fanners; (b) township and village enterprises (TVEs) which are owned collectively by rural communities; and (c) state owned enterprises (SOEs) where increased competition and increased wage incentive, but not privatization, have been emphasized. The convergence school holds that China's successes are the consequences of its institutions being allowed to converge with those of non-socialist market economies, and that China's economic structure at the start of reforms is a major explanation for the rapid growth. China had a high population density heavily concentrated in low-wage agriculture...
Home State Responsibility and Local Communities: The Case of Global Mining

Home states that are actively engaged in global mining have considered and rejected calls to regulate the conduct of transnational mining corporations so as to prevent and remedy human rights and environmental harms. This reluctance to regulate is often expressed as a concern that extraterritorial regulation will conflict with the sovereignty of foreign states. This paper argues that the public international law of jurisdiction is permissive of home state regulation that can be justified under the nationality or territoriality principles, provided that there is no true conflict with an exercise of host state jurisdiction. In the human rights and environment contexts, it is more likely that home state regulation would result in concurrent but not conflicting jurisdiction, particularly where the regulation is designed to further shared international norms. Beyond permissibility, this paper argues that international sustainable mineral development law imposes an emerging obligation on all states, including home states, to ensure that the three pillars of public participation rights are respected. These rights are access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters, and they are formulated in the global mining context as a right of indigenous and local communities to free, prior and informed consent. Support for the existence of such a home state obligation may be found in the recommendations of international human rights treaty bodies, and in the work of the International Law Commission on both state responsibility, and the prevention and allocation of loss for transboundary harm.
Multinational Enterprises, International Trade, and Productivity Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from the United States

Abstract We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is economically important, accounting for about 14% of productivity growth in U.S. firms between 1987 and 1996. FDI spillovers are particularly strong in high-tech sectors, whereas they are largely absent in low-tech sectors. Small firms with low productivity benefit more from FDI spillovers than larger productivity firms with more productivity do. The evidence for import spillovers is much weaker.
Commitment and Cost of Equity Capital: An Examination of Timely Balance Sheet Disclosure in Earnings Announcements

In this paper, I examine the relation between disclosure commitment and cost of equity capital using accelerated earnings announcement disclosures as a measure of commitment. In settings characterized by imperfect market competition, I find that firms which consistently disclose balance sheet detail in relatively timely earnings announcements have lower costs of capital compared to other firms. This result is statistically significant and economically meaningful, and is robust to various alternative measurements for cost of capital, and alternative designs addressing endogeneity and underlying information quality. Overall, this result is important because it highlights additional dimensions of disclosure commitment (consistency and timeliness), while incorporating important features from theoretical models (information quality and market competition). In particular, my results suggest that consistency and timeliness are salient features of firms' disclosure behavior that have predictable and robust relations with capital market outcomes. This result is robust to controlling for underlying information quality; however, consistent with theory, it is conditional on low levels of market competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Standing Outside of Article III

The Supreme Court has repeatedly insisted that standing doctrine is a “bedrock” requirement only of Article III. Accordingly, both jurists and scholars have assumed that the standing of the executive branch and the legislature, like that of other parties, depends solely on Article III. But I argue that these commentators have overlooked a basic constitutional principle: Federal institutions must have affirmative authority for their actions, including the power to bring suit or appeal in federal court. Article III defines the federal “judicial Power” and does not purport to confer any authority on the executive branch or the legislature. Executive and legislative standing instead depend in large part on the provisions conferring power on those institutions ― principally, Article II and Article I. This basic insight has important implications. I argue that the Take Care Clause of Article II helps both to explain the breadth and also to define the limits of executive standing. The executive has standing only insofar as it has an Article II power and duty to enforce and defend federal law on behalf of the federal government. The Take Care Clause does not, however, confer standing when the executive no longer asserts that law enforcement interest ― when it declines to defend a federal law. Article I, for its part, does not confer any power on Congress to enforce or defend federal laws in court. Accordingly, contrary to the assumption of many scholars, Congress lacks standing to represent the United States in place of the executive. The Supreme Court has entirely overlooked these questions of institutional power in considering issues of executive or legislative standing, including most recently in the litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act. Article III cannot confer power on the executive or the legislature that Article II or Article I denies.
The patent holder's dilemma: buy, sell, or troll?

The current patent process in many ways works against IT innovation by making the road to realization too dispiriting for today's independent inventors.
External Networking and Internal Firm Governance

We use panel data on S&P 1500 companies to identify external network connections between directors and CEOs. We find that firms with more powerful CEOs are more likely to appoint directors with ties to the CEO. Using changes in board composition due to director death and retirement for identification, we find that CEO-director ties reduce firm value, particularly in the absence of other governance mechanisms to substitute for board oversight. Moreover, firms with more CEO-director ties engage in more value-destroying acquisitions. Overall, our results suggest that network ties with the CEO weaken the intensity of board monitoring.
The Effect of Common Features on Brand Choice: Moderating Role of Attribute Importance

In this article, the effect of common features on brand choice and the moderating role of attribute importance are examined. It is argued that when brand attributes differ in importance, common features are likely to enhance consumer preferences for the option with the best value on the most important attribute, thus further polarizing brands' choice shares. In contrast, when attributes are similar in their importance, common features are likely to have an opposite effect, equalizing brands' shares. The data provide support for these propositions.
Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.