cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Cohort crowding: How resources affect collegiate attainment

Abstract Analyses of college attainment typically focus on factors affecting enrollment demand, including the financial attractiveness of a college education and the availability of financial aid, while implicitly assuming that resources available per student on the supply-side of the market are elastically supplied. The higher education market in the United States is dominated by public and non-profit production, and colleges and universities receive considerable subsidies from state, federal, and private sources. Because consumers pay only a fraction of the cost of production, changes in demand are unlikely to be accommodated fully by colleges and universities without commensurate increases in non-tuition revenue. For this reason, public investment in higher education plays a crucial role in determining the degrees produced and the supply of college-educated workers to the labor market. Using data covering the last half of the twentieth century, we find strong evidence that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment, reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market. That large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result, indicating that resources have large effects on degree production. Our results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college-educated workers entering the labor market.
Is Happiness Shared Doubled and Sadness Shared Halved? Social Influence on Enjoyment of Hedonic Experiences

Abstract Because many hedonic stimuli (e.g., movies, vacations, food) are often consumed in the company of other people, it is important to know how social influence affects the enjoyment of shared experiences. Extrapolation from informational and normative influences suggests that enjoyment is enhanced when others offer positive opinions and diminished when they offer negative opinions about shared stimuli. In this article, the authors propose an alternative model. Building on the need to belong and the need for accuracy, the authors predict that enjoyment from sharing stimuli depends on consumers' perceived interpersonal agreements about the shared stimuli, such that congruence of opinions enhances and incongruence of opinions diminishes the enjoyment of the shared experience. The results from three experiments support the authors' predictions and indicate that under some circumstances, social influence can operate in opposite directions on judgments of shared stimuli and on the enjoyment of sharing them.
The Demand for Medical Care in Urban China

Abstract The link between health and productivity on the one hand, and the growing demand for health services and the shortage of funds to finance the health care system on the other hand pose a major challenge for developing countries. This paper uses a data set that consists of detailed characteristics of 6,407 urban households from People’s Republic of China to investigate the determinants of the demand for medical care. A two-part model and a discrete factor model are used in the estimation. Income elasticity is around 0.3, indicating medical care is a necessity. Medical care demand is price inelastic, and price elasticity is larger in absolute value for poorer households. This suggests that while total revenue from provision of health care can be increased by raising the price of care in the inelastic segment of the demand curve, this would increase the inequality in access to medical care.
Common Errors: How to (and Not to) Control for Unobserved Heterogeneity

Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity (or “common errors”), such as industry-specific shocks, is a fundamental challenge in empirical research, as failing to do so can introduce omitted variables biases and preclude causal inference. This paper discusses limitations of two approaches commonly used to control for unobserved group-level heterogeneity in finance research—demeaning the dependent variable with respect to the group (e.g., “industry-adjusting”) and adding the mean of the group’s dependent variable as a control. We show that these techniques, which are used widely in both asset pricing and corporate finance research, typically provide inconsistent coefficients and can lead researchers to incorrect inferences. In contrast, the fixed effects estimator is consistent and should be used instead. We also explain how to estimate the fixed effects model when traditional methods are computationally infeasible. (JEL G12, G2, G3, C01, C13)
A Reply to Professors Cain and Charles

Professor Cain is skeptical of an “original-intent account” because he believes it “rests on too many contestable counterfactual assumptions regarding what the Founders would have thought.” So am I. There are plenty of cases in which the Court entertains just such a complicated inquiry—Second Amendment cases are just the most obvious— and I share the skepticism of political science (and many of my colleagues in the legal academy) about whether such inquiries actually identify anything about the understanding of the Framers, as opposed to the politics of the judges. But my argument, based on the Jorde Symposium lecture, is not counterfactual. My argument is factual: What did the Framers mean by the word “corruption?” Drawing upon their words and their usage, my claim is that they used the term “corruption” in a wider range of contexts than we do today —corruption predicated of institutions as well as individuals. And of all its different senses, quid pro quo corruption was likely the least significant case. I may or may not be right about that. But there’s nothing counterfactual in that argument: to the contrary, it is a claim about how they in fact used the term. That original understanding is relevant to current doctrine because the Supreme Court has made “corruption” so central to determining the scope of the First Amendment. Thus my argument to the originalists at least is that if
The Rise of the Common Law of Federal Pleading: Iqbal, Twombly, and the Application of Judicial Experience

With its decisions in Twombly and Iqbal, the Supreme Court established a new federal pleading standard: a complaint must state a plausible claim for relief. Many commentators have written about the meaning of plausibility. None has focused on the Court’s statement that “[d]etermining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief...will be a context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.” In this article, I make and support several claims about the meaning and application of judicial experience. First, in order to understand and define the plausibility standard, one must understand the meaning and application of judicial experience. The requirement that district courts apply judicial experience to resolve a motion to dismiss is a new part of the federal pleading regime, just like the new plausibility standard. Second, the application of judicial experience – as intended by the Supreme Court – requires district courts to consider information and evidence beyond that alleged in the complaint when resolving a motion to dismiss. Third, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the Supreme Court does not intend the application of judicial experience to involve a subjective analysis of the plausibility of a claim. Instead, the Supreme Court intends district courts to consider a larger, objective body of experience – beyond the subjective experience of any particular district court – with similar factual scenarios. Fourth, the Supreme Court anticipates that the application of judicial experience will require district courts to develop a common law of pleading standards that will vary with the type of claim, the type of claimant, the type of defendant and the alleged factual scenario. The Court has expressly denied that plausibility “require[s] heightened fact pleading of specifics,” but what plausibility means is informed by judicial experience. Sometimes plausibility requires more convincing facts (not more specific facts). Finally, I argue that this new pleading regime that requires the application of judicial experience at the pleading stage – even where it is based on objective information – is inappropriate and inconsistent with the adversarial nature of litigation.
Spectral evolution of two high-energy gamma-ray bursts

The prompt emission of the gamma-ray bursts is found to be very energetic, releasing ~10^51 ergs in a flash. However, their emission mechanism remains unclear and understanding their spectra is a key to determining the emission mechanism. Many GRB spectra have been analyzed in the sub-MeV energy band, and are usually well described with a smoothly broken power-law model. We present a spectral analysis of two bright bursts (GRB910503 and GRB930506), using BATSE and EGRET spectra that cover more than four decades of energy (30 keV - 200 MeV). Our results show time evolutions of spectral parameters (low-energy & high-energy photon indices and break energy) that are difficult to reconcile with a simple shock-acceleration model.
Stealth Disclosure of Accounting Restatements

ABSTRACT: Managers exercise considerable discretion over how they announce an accounting restatement in a press release. Some firms issue a press release that discloses the restatement in the headline (high prominence). Others provide a press release with a headline on a different subject (for example, earnings news) but describe the restatement in the body of the release (medium prominence). The remaining firms discuss the restatement at the end of the press release in a footnote to operating results (low prominence). Mean three‐day returns differ considerably across these three categories of prominence (−8.3, −4.0, and −1.5 percent, respectively). We find that disclosure prominence is significantly negatively associated with returns in a model that controls for the seriousness of the GAAP violation, restatement magnitude, other restatement characteristics, and potential endogeneity. Similarly, we find the likelihood of class action lawsuits is significantly reduced with less prominent disclosure.
Competition issues in restructuring ports and railways including brief consideration of these sectors in India

EAG Discussion Papers are the primary vehicle used to disseminate research from economists in the Economic Analysis Group (EAG) of the Antitrust Division. These papers are intended to inform interested individuals and institutions of EAG=s research program and to stimulate comment and criticism on economic issues related to antitrust policy and regulation. The Antitrust Division encourages independent research by its economists. The views expressed herein are entirely those of the author and are not purported to reflect those of the United States Department of Justice.
The effect of SOX on the predictability of future cash flows in litigious and non-litigious industries

We investigate whether the role of discretionary accruals in predicting future operating cash flows changes after the passage of SOX. We also examine the information content of discretionary accruals in litigious industries. We find that discretionary accruals are positively associated with future operating cash flows and that discretionary accruals become even more important to predict future cash flows during the post-SOX period. Findings also indicate that litigious industry firms impart greater information content relative to those in nonlitigious industries prior to SOX being issued and that the SOX effect on discretionary accruals is weaker for such firms as a result.
Obstacles to disinflation: what is the role of fiscal expectations?

Persistently high expected inflation often makes it difficult for policy-makers to recover from inflationary episodes without substantial output losses. Using survey data from eleven disinflation episodes, we can assess whether the more or less sluggish decline of inflation rates towards lower target levels is related to backward-looking pricing behavior or to imperfect credibility of the stabilization efforts. We find that expectations of future inflation play a much more important role than past inflation in shaping the inflation process. Second, we find that an improvement in various measures of fiscal balances significantly reduces inflation expectations. This evidence suggests that, when attempting to stabilize inflation, priority should be given to building fiscal credibility. — Oya Celasun, R. Gaston Gelos and Alessandro Prati
The Corrective Careers of Concurrences and Dissents

Dissenting opinions and many concurring opinions include non-binding statements, rationales, and explanations. What compels judges to add their losing arguments to the vast deposit of rejected legal propositions? This chapter argues that such opinions, although lacking in compulsory application and effect, contribute to our fund of knowledge, diversify our perspectives, and shape the trajectory of the law as it is embedded in a textual network of cases. Judges are dialogic, discursive actors who, by framing and molding legal precedents, participate in the transmission of cultural postulates and practical solutions to future generations with unforeseen conflicts. Judges are in this sense the conduits through which pass selectively retained principles and gradual modifications in the rules that govern society. Understanding why judges author concurring or dissenting opinions that do not obtain as law requires some historical mapping; thus, the chapter begins by supplying a brief account of the opinion practices of the US Supreme Court. It then discusses why non-binding opinions such as concurrences or dissents are constructive. The success of these writings, some of which have been vindicated over time, owes to their ability to shape the character and facilitate the development of American constitutional law. The chapter concludes by discussing how such opinions reflect and enact the common-law theories on which the American legal system has flourished, and finally by celebrating concurring and dissenting opinions as an intricate and important form of judicial service to the legal profession.
Asset liquidity and financial contracts: Evidence from aircraft leases

Financial contracting theories agree that more-liquid assets decrease the expected cost of external financing, thus making leasing more attractive and reducing lessors’ equilibrium return. However, the literature has ambiguous predictions about the effect of liquidity on the maturity of leases. These predictions are further complicated by the existence of two types of lease contracts—operating and capital—that differ in whether asset ownership transfers to the lessee at the end of the contract. Using data from commercial aircraft, I find that more-liquid assets (1) make leasing, operating leasing in particular, more likely; (2) have shorter operating leases; (3) have longer capital leases; and (4) command lower markups of operating lease rates.
Economic Consequences of Mandated Accounting Disclosures: Evidence from Pension Accounting Standards

ABSTRACT: I examine whether firms alter their behavior in response to changes in accounting standards that mandate new financial statement disclosures. While prior research suggests that new recognition rules lead to changes in firm behavior, there is limited evidence that disclosure rules can impact firm behavior. This study helps to fill this void in the literature by examining the economic consequences of the mandated disclosures of pension asset composition required under SFAS 132R. Under pension accounting rules, the composition of pension assets is a key determinant of the assumed expected rate of return (ERR) on pension assets. I find that when firms disclose asset composition for the first time under SFAS 132R, firms that were previously using upward-biased ERRs respond by increasing asset allocation to high-risk securities and/or reducing the ERR assumption. While disclosure requirements arguably create less powerful incentives to alter firm decisions than recognition requirements, these findings...
An evaluation of alternative measures of corporate tax rates

Abstract This paper examines the ability of financial statement measures of average and marginal tax rates (MTR) to capture tax attributes utilizing firm-level tax and financial data. The results suggest commonly used average tax rate measures provide little insight about statutory tax burdens, and may introduce substantial bias into analyses of tax incidence. Financial statement-based proxies for MTR, particularly those based on simulation methods, are found to perform well in estimating current year tax rates. Both current year and present value MTR are found to be highly correlated with an easily constructed binary proxy of firms’ tax status.
Wholesale access in multi-firm markets: When is it profitable to supply a competitor? ☆

Abstract We address the question whether and on what conditions will an access-seeker be provided with access to a necessary input. We study this question in a model in which multiple vertically-integrated firms-potential access providers-compete. Although it might seem in such a setting that competition for the business of the potential access-seeker will invariably lead to the provision of the necessary input on terms that are sufficiently attractive to induce entry, we find that whether access is provided depends on whether the firms' inputs are homogeneous or differentiated, whether diversion to the entrant's product impacts incumbent firms proportionally or differentially, and whether the entrant can commit to the positioning of its product ex-ante. Our results have implications for policy makers who must decide whether to intervene in access markets.
Measuring Accounting Reporting Complexity with XBRL

ABSTRACT We propose a new measure of accounting reporting complexity (ARC) based on the count of accounting items (XBRL tags) disclosed in 10-K filings. The preparation and disclosure of more accounting items is complicated because it requires greater knowledge of authoritative accounting standards. This aspect of complexity can increase the likelihood of mistakes, incorrect application of GAAP, and can ultimately lead to less credible financial reports. Consistently, we find that ARC is associated with a greater likelihood of misstatements and material weakness disclosures, longer audit delay, and higher audit fees. In comparison to commonly used measures of operating and linguistic complexity, the associations between ARC and these outcomes are more consistent, exhibit greater explanatory power, and have stronger economic significance. These and additional validation and robustness tests suggest that ARC more completely reflects accounting complexity. In addition, ARC exhibits several advantageous prope...
Listening to Tribal Legends: An Essay on Law and the Scientific Method

Much of jurisprudence is storytelling, recounting tales of what has gone before; improvising and crafting new stories of legal theory from old ones. Useful kernels are passed from one generation of legal thinkers to the next. Like tribal legends, the messages in many stories of jurisprudence can be understood only by a select audience. Legends often come with morals; theories of jurisprudence often impart prescription for living within the law. Jurisprudence, like legends, concerns fundamental issues, confronts cosmic questions and weaves in magic. Sometimes both possess humor as well. Unfortunately, some modern versions of jurisprudential theories have become anecdotal. The legal storytellers engage in revisionist tales of history and the listeners selectively perceive. In many ways, we are not listening to our tribal legends. One of the stories of jurisprudence is of law and science. It is the tale of two tribes, each with its own legends, prescriptions and imagery. Different schools of jurisprudence have treated science in legal theory in varied ways. There have been scattered attempts to apply scientific frameworks to law to explain or predict outcomes, analyze data or support propositions relating to substantive issues. Some discuss ways in which the scientific model can operate on the decisional level. There has been no systematic attempt, however, to define the modern scientific method in the context of law or to analyze its application to jurisprudence. Recent jurisprudential theories contrast science with practical reason. Consequently, there is significant controversy over the use of the scientific method in jurisprudence. This Article observes that the use of science in law has been limited by the assumption that principles of scientific inquiry must be abandoned when law faces value choices. It posits that the scientific method's criteria of validation can apply to decision about values as well as facts. It makes the claim that the principles of scientific inquiry are essentially criteria of rationality. To the extent that the goal of law is rationality, legal theory should follow the criteria contained in and adopt the values implied by the scientific method. This Article does not attempt to articulate a comprehensive theory of science, law or the intersection of the two; nor does it offer a positive program of scientific adjudications for decisionmakers. Its goal is to entice both jurists and theorists to think more systematically and self-analytically about their theories, reasoning, conclusions and areas of ignorance. This Article suggests that attention to the principles of scientific inquiry is one method of improving the rationality of legal decisions and theories.
The Best Things in Life are (Nearly) Free: Technology, Knowledge, and Global Health

Summary This paper argues that there are two major factors underlying improved global health outcomes. These are, first, the discovery of cheap technologies that can dramatically improve outcomes and, second, the adoption of these technologies thanks to the spread of knowledge. Other factors have played a role. Increased income not only allows for improved nutrition, but also helps to improve access to more complex preventative technologies. Institutional development is a second key to the spread of such complex technologies. Nonetheless, evidence of dramatic health improvements even in environments of weak institutions and stagnant incomes suggests that the role of these factors may be secondary.
Optimal Collateralized Contracts

We examine the role of collateral in a dynamic model of optimal credit contracts in which a borrower values both housing and nonhousing consumption. The borrower's private information about his income is the only friction. An optimal contract is collateralized when in some state, some portion of the borrower's net worth is forfeited to the lender. We show that optimal contracts are always collateralized. The total value of forfeited assets is decreasing in income, highlighting the role of collateral as a deterrent to manipulation. Some assetsâ€”those that generate consumable servicesâ€”will necessarily be collateralized, while others may not be. Endogenous default arises when the borrower's initial wealth is low, as with subprime borrowers, and/or his future earnings are highly variable.
Laying Your Online Self to Rest: Evaluating the Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act

Handling digital assets after death presents numerous practical, legal, and moral problems. The Uniform Law Commission, which produces the Uniform Probate Code and numerous other Model and Uniform laws, has released a discussion draft of a Proposed Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act to address the disposition of digital assets at death. This note will examine this Uniform Act and the problems it seeks to solve. Part I explores the different types of digital assets and how courts are dealing with these assets in multiple types of litigation. Part II discusses the legislative solutions currently in place and under construction for handling digital assets at death. Part III analyzes the Proposed Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act and discuss its innovations and shortfalls. Part IV analyzes what types of control fiduciaries should be allowed to exercise over digital assets. This Note concludes with recommendations on how to best improve the Uniform Act.
The price of corporate liquidity: Acquisition discounts for unlisted targets

Abstract This paper documents average acquisition discounts for stand-alone private firms and subsidiaries of other firms (unlisted targets) of 15% to 30% relative to acquisition multiples for comparable publicly traded targets. My results are strongly consistent with the notion that sale prices for unlisted targets are affected by both the need for, and availability of, the liquidity provided by the buyer. Corporate parents are significantly liquidity-constrained prior to the sale of a subsidiary, particularly when the subsidiary is being sold for cash. Furthermore, acquisition discounts are significantly greater when debt capital is relatively more expensive to obtain, and when the parent firm has below-market stock returns in the 12 months prior to the sale.
A Critique of the Contingent Claims Approach to Sovereign Risk Analysis

In this paper, I examine the contingent claims approach (CCA) to measuring sovereign risk. Specifically, I extend previous work in this area and apply the CCA framework to three emerging markets—Brazil, Mexico, and Turkey—over the period 2001-10. I find that the CCA underestimates credit default swap spreads and default probabilities. Consequently, I point out the shortcomings of the CCA and suggest some remedies.
Sarbanes-Oxley, Kermit the Frog, and Competition Regarding Audit Quality

The regulatory scheme after Sarbanes-Oxley has significantly improved public company audits in the United States, or at least has demonstrated the potential to do so, but the obligation to preserve client confidentially still prevents auditors from competing for new clients on the basis of audit quality. This paper suggests a simple way for the SEC to facilitate such competition within the existing regulatory framework. The SEC should require issuers and registrants to disclose whether their independent audits uncovered any financial fraud and, within specified ranges, the number and amount of all audit adjustments incorporated into the financial statements filed with the Commission. Auditing firms could use this then-public information, plus perhaps data about the infrequency of any restatements to financial statements on which the firm had expressed an unqualified opinion, to evidence the quality of the firm's audits relative to those of its competitors. The PCAOB might also incorporate such information in its inspection reports. Although audit industry experts agree that we cannot directly observe audit quality, accountants have constructed and deployed empirical proxies for audit quality, such as abnormal accruals, to study aggregate behavior across samples of registrants, rather than to report individual behavior within a single registrant. As another proxy for audit quality, this proposal, which seeks to publicize the actual number and dollar amount of audit adjustments, measures directly what abnormal accruals measure indirectly. With such data, investors, audit committees, and other participants in our capital markets, could better assess the quality and value of the independent audits that registered public accounting firms provide. Initially, auditing firms could better compete within tiers regarding audit quality. Eventually, the proposal might allow second-tier auditing firms to expand their audit practices and to enhance their reputations sufficiently to compete with the Big Four, potentially reducing concentration in the industry.
Information Wants to Be Free: Intellectual Property and the Mythologies of Control

This article challenges a central tenet of the recent criticism of intellectual property rights: the suggestion that the control conferred by such rights is detrimental to the continued flourishing of a public domain of ideas and information. I argue that such theories understate the significance of the intangible nature of information, and thus overlook the contribution that even perfectly controlled intellectual creations make to the public domain. In addition, I show that perfect control of propertized information - an animating assumption in much of the contemporary criticism - is both counterfactual and likely to remain so. These findings suggest that increasing the appropriability of information goods may in many cases grow, rather than diminish, the quantity of open information. Further, the benefits of control in fostering coordination and enabling flexibility in arrangements are essential elements of promoting progress in a changing world.
The missing currency of Israeli/Palestinian negotiations

The premise of the Arab–Israeli ‘land for peace’ process is that each side values what it will receive more than what it must surrender. The repeated failure of this process spanning decades reveals the shocking truth that this premise is erroneous. For the process to succeed, the currency that the Arabs must bring to the table is the ability and willingness to pay for their sovereignty in the currency of vigorous enforcement of Israeli rights and privileges, something they are not willing to do. Why not? At present, the payoff to the Palestinian Arabs as a body of a state is simply not worth the price they must pay.
Unawareness—A gentle introduction to both the literature and the special issue

Abstract This article provides a brief survey of the literature on unawareness and introduces the contributions to the special issue on unawareness in Mathematical Social Sciences. First, we provide a brief overview both about epistemic models of unawareness and models of extensive-form games with unawareness. Instead of introducing the approaches in full detail, we illustrate the main differences and similarities with the help of examples. Finally, we discuss the contributions to the special issue on unawareness.
Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Melissa J. Ganz, “Carrying On Like a Madman: Insanity and Responsibility in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ” (pp. 363–397) This essay reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) alongside medico-legal debates about the nature and scope of insanity, arguing that the novel seeks to shore up the idea of individual responsibility in Victorian society. The cognitive test of insanity that emerged from the M’Naghten case of 1843 deemed a person legally irresponsible for his acts if, due to a defect of reason resulting from mental disease, he was unable to perceive the nature and quality of his acts or to know that they were wrong. Alienists such as James Cowles Prichard and Henry Maudsley, however, argued that this test failed to acknowledge the existence of affective and volitional disorders such as moral and impulsive insanity. In their treatises, they urged judges to adopt a more permissive standard—an “irresistible impulse” test—that deemed accused criminals “mad” if they could not control their actions, even if they knew what they were doing was wrong. While the novel appears to be sympathetic to the position articulated by Prichard and Maudsley, I argue, it ultimately shows the dangers of broadening the definition of insanity. To recognize the idea of irresistible impulse as the basis of an insanity defense, Stevenson suggests, is to confound the distinctions between freedom and compulsion, deviance and disease. Contesting the use of emotional insanity to acquit educated professionals like Jekyll, Stevenson holds the doctor guilty of murder.
Political Bargaining and Judicial Intervention in Constitutional and Antitrust Federalism

Federal judicial deference to state and local regulation is at the center of contentious debates regarding the implementation of competition policy. This Article invokes a political process bargaining framework to develop a principled approach for addressing the appropriate level of judicial intervention under the dormant commerce clause and state-action immunity from antitrust enforcement. Using illustrations from network industries, it is argued that, at core, these two independent doctrines share a common concern with political (not only market) failure by focusing on the incentives faced by powerful stakeholders in state and local lawmaking. More important, they share the common purpose of deterring the adoption of regulations with adverse spillover effects for those who do not participate in the relevant lawmaking process. The Article illustrates how a political process bargaining approach to these doctrines differs in its recommendations from traditional formulations, with implications for the degree of deference courts afford state and local laws.
Justifying Extraterritorial War Crimes Trials

The international community has yet to develop a broadly accepted philosophical rationale for the extraterritorial adjudication of war crimes. Instead, several justifications exist in a state of tension that produces uncertainties in the applicable legal doctrines and policies. This article explains how the competition between the “atrocities” approach on the one hand, and the statist and humanitarian rationales on the other, causes instability in the regime. It advocates for increased attention to the philosophical grounding of extraterritorial war crimes trials, particularly in light of the increasing frequency of such trials before international courts as well as national courts exercising universal jurisdiction.
Issues in the Credit Risk Modeling of Retail Markets

Abstract We survey the most recent BIS proposals for the credit risk measurement of retail credits in capital regulations. We also describe the recent trend away from relationship lending toward transactional lending in the small business loan arena. These trends create the opportunity to adopt more analytical, data-based approaches to credit risk measurement. We survey proprietary credit scoring models (such as Fair Isaac), as well as options-theoretic structural models (such as KMV and Moody’s RiskCalc), and reduced-form models (such as Credit Risk Plus). These models allow lenders and regulators to develop techniques that rely on portfolio aggregation to measure retail credit risk exposure.
Statutory Violations and Equitable Discretion

In this Article the author examines the role of equitable discretion in the modern statutory context. It begins in Part I with a proposition that can be as unsettling to trained legal minds as it is self-evident to those without the benefit of a legal education: that a court has no discretion or authority to exercise equitable powers so as to permit violations of statutes to continue. Part II explores the traditional forms of equitable discretion as they exist in the classic common law context. In Part III, the Article demonstrates how separating equitable balancing into its three components permits conventional notions about the scope equitable discretion to be reconciled with modern statutory imperatives. Finally, Part IV analyzes the consequences of equitable deference to statutory mandates.
Private Prediction Markets and the Law

This paper analyses the legality of private prediction markets under U.S. law, describing both the legal risks they raise and how to manage those risks. As the label "private" suggests, such markets offer trading not to the public but rather only to members of a particular firm. The use of private prediction markets has grown in recent years because they can efficiently collect and quantify information that firms find useful in making management decisions. Along with that considerable benefit, however, comes a worrisome cost: the risk that running a private prediction market might violate U.S. state or federal laws. The ends and means of private prediction markets differ materially from those of futures, securities, or gambling markets. Laws written for those latter three institutions nonetheless threaten to limit or even outlaw private prediction markets. As the paper details, however, careful legal engineering can protect private prediction markets from violating U.S. laws or suffering crushing regulatory burdens. The paper concludes with a prediction about the likely form of potential CFTC regulations and a long-term strategy for ensuring the success of private prediction markets under U.S. law.
Punitive Damages, Due Process, and Employment Discrimination

The Supreme Court has failed to provide any substantive guidance on when punitive damages are appropriate in employment discrimination cases since it issued its seminal decision in Kolstad v. American Dental Ass’n over twelve years ago. The Court has recently expanded its punitive damages jurisprudence in the high-profile decisions of Philip Morris USA v. Williams and Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker. While these cases dramatically altered the way exemplary relief is analyzed in civil cases, the extent to which these decisions apply in the workplace context remains unclear. Surprisingly, there has been almost no academic literature to date explaining how Philip Morris and Exxon impact punitive damages claims brought by employment discrimination plaintiffs. This Article seeks to fill that substantial void in the scholarship, looking specifically at the potential due process implications.
Power Couples: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the State of Their Unions

This essay is part of a symposium entitled Following Marriage, a prompt designed to open for the contributing authors' exploration many possible paths from a shared point of departure, marriage. Thus, Following Marriage could suggest events that might take place after a given marriage (such as divorce or death), developments that have emerged beyond marriage (such as civil unions or domestic partnerships), conceptual changes that might follow as traditional marriage undergoes contemporary transformations (such as the deconstruction of gender or of sexual orientation, the decentering of sex, and resistance to marriage and the privilege that it entails), or an argument that makes the case for adhering to the traditional approach to marriage - to list just a few of the possibilities initially contemplated. Against this background, Power Couples tackles a question that becomes particularly salient after marriage, even as traditionally defined (although similar questions can arise with respect to other intimate and familial relationships as well): What perceptions and inferences does contemporary marriage generate about conflicts of interest for spouses with intersecting careers? This essay examines this question in the context of a notable phenomenon in the nation's capital that has just begun to receive official attention - marriages in which one spouse serves as a member of Congress and the other works as a lobbyist. This case study reveals how ethical constraints centered on avoiding appearances of impropriety run aground when confronting two antagonistic principles of modern family law: the conceptualization of marriage as a (financial) partnership and the recognition of spouses, especially in the public sphere, as fully independent individuals. The problem posed by such power couples, saturated as it is with gender politics, permits no easy solution, despite Congress's belated and hurried efforts to enact rules disavowing a culture of corruption at the start of the 110th Congress. This essay concludes that only a mechanism capable of undertaking case-by-case review and nuanced analysis is up to the task of ensuring respect for the many competing values at stake, such as government integrity, gender equality, individual autonomy, family privacy, and the touted place of marriage in family law. Because one co-author of Power Couples, Robyn Rimmer, died suddenly just before publication of the bound volume of symposium, the version of the essay posted electronically begins with a letter honoring her memory, written by the other co-author, Susan Appleton, to accompany mailed reprints of the essay.
Does Shari’a Play a Role in Turkey?

This essay is intended to introduce my empirical project exploring Turkish perceptions of law and religion. I returned from Istanbul in the summer of 2013, having recently completed data collection. The data and analysis support a number of important findings. First, there was a trend of increasing support for Shari'a within Turkey, and education appeared to correlate (inversely) with this preference more than religiosity. Turks under thirty were more likely to be religious than those between thirty and fifty, and those under thirty who identified as religious were more likely to have a university education. Interpretations of Shari'a in Turkey differed from those in other predominantly Muslim countries. The influence of the AKP in combining commitments to Islamic ethics, center-right politics, neoliberal economics and Kemalist republican values likely accentuated this distinction by validating the consistency of secular constitutionalism and Islam.
Currency competition: A partial vindication of Hayek☆

Abstract This paper establishes the existence of equilibria for environments in which outside money is issued competitively. Such equilibria are typically believed not to exist because of a classic overissue problem: if money is valued in equilibrium, an issuer produces money until its value is driven to zero. By backward induction, money cannot have value in the first place. This paper shows that overissuance is not a problem if agents believe that if an issuer produces more than some threshold number of notes, then only those notes issued up to the threshold will be valued; additional notes will be worthless. This result is very general, applying to any monetary economy in which equilibria with and without valued money exist if the money supply is finite. The paper also compares the allocation achieved by a monopolist to that achieved with competitive issuance in both a search and an overlapping-generations environment. The results depend on the environment considered, but two general conclusions arise. First, it is ambiguous whether competitive issuers can achieve a more desirable allocation than a monopolist. Second, with competitive issuance, a licensing agency can always improve on pure laissez-faire and achieve the efficient allocation in the long run.
Finite sample properties of tests of the Epstein–Zin asset pricing model

Abstract This paper investigates the small sample properties of Hansen and Singleton (1982, Econometrica 50, 1269–1286)-type GMM tests of asset pricing restrictions implied by Epstein and Zin (1989, Econometrica 57, 937–969) preferences. The Monte Carlo results suggest that tests of the Epstein and Zin (1989, Econometrica 57, 937–969) asset pricing model often have little size-adjusted power to reject asset pricing restrictions implied by simpler, time and state separable expected utility preferences, even when parameters are chosen to make the difference between the relative risk aversion parameter and the reciprocal of the intertemporal substitution parameter large. There is evidence that a Wald test has greater power than other tests and that use of the Hansen et al. (1996, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 14, 262–280) continuous-updating GMM estimator improves the power of the tests.
Organizational forms and investment decisions

Abstract This paper analyzes investment rules for various organizational forms that are distinguished by the characteristics of their residual claims. Different restrictions on residual claims lead to different decision rules. The analysis indicates that the investment decisions of open corporations, financial mutuals and non-profits can be modeled by the value maximization rule. However, the decisions of proprietorships, partnerships, and closed corporations cannot in general be modeled by the market value rule.
When Do Living Wages Bite

Many features of living wage laws may influence the strength of their effects on wages and employment of low-skill individuals. Echoing past research, business assistance living wage laws generate stronger wage increases and employment reductions than contractor-only laws. But broader enforcement or implementation and geographic concentration of living wage laws also appear to strengthen their effects. Finally, geographic concentration may be more significant than the distinction between business assistance and contractor-only living wage laws.
The Relationship between Law and Development: Optimists Versus Skeptics

Over the past two decades there has been a resurgence of interest, on the part of both academics and practitioners, in using law to promote development in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia. The level of academic interest in the topic is reflected in the publication of three recent books on law and development by prominent American scholars: Thomas Carothers (ed.), PROMOTING THE RULE OF LAW ABROAD: IN SEARCH OF KNOWLEDGE, Kenneth Dam, THE LAW-GROWTH NEXUS: THE RULE OF LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, and David Trubek and Alvaro Santos (eds.), THE NEW LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL. In this Essay we suggest that these books (or at least some contributions to them) reflect insensitivity to the ambiguities surrounding the relationship between legal reform and development. We show that there is ongoing debate about fundamental questions such as whether law is an important factor in determining social or economic outcomes in developing societies given the existence of informal methods of social control; whether there are insurmountable economic, political or culture obstacles to effective legal reform; as well as, assuming effective legal reform is feasible, what types of reforms are conducive to development and what types of actors ought to implement them. We argue that although there are some reasons for optimism about the potential impact of legal reforms upon development, the relevant empirical literature is inconclusive on many important issues and counsels caution about the wisdom of continuing to invest substantial resources in promoting legal reform in developing countries without further research that clarifies these issues. * We are grateful to Helen Hershkoff, Stephen Humphreys, Kate Lauer, Mariana Prado and Frank Upham for helpful comments and conversations. Kevin Davis gratefully acknowledges the support of the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research Fund at NYU School of Law.
Role and Contribution of Foreign-Born Scientists and Engineers to the Public U.S. Nanoscience and Technology Research Enterprise

Foreign-born scientists and researchers have long been a fixture in the U.S. R&D system. This paper examines a key indicator of scientific performance - individual research productivity. In a large sample of public sector researchers in nanoscience and technology, it was found that foreign-born scientists are consistently more productive than their native-born counterparts across different organizational settings and within a federal laboratory environment. The results furthermore show that male foreign-born researchers are more productive than their female peers in an unusually multidisciplinary research environment, except in the federal laboratory system. Both policy and management implications of these findings will be discussed. An open-versus closed-door immigration policy debate has historically resulted in policies that favor an open-door immigration policy for foreign-born researchers, but lately, and particularly since September 2001, the policy pendulum has started to swing in the other direction. I argue that a reasonable and sound immigration and science policy would balance the benefits of having a strong contingent of foreign-born researchers with the interests of current and future native-born researchers. Research-intensive organizations would serve their interests well by initiating or sustaining diversity and equal opportunity employment practices, which are likely to have a positive impact on research productivity.