cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments

Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which agents exert costly effort while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These environments have been studied using Tullock contests, all-pay auctions and rank-order tournaments. This survey provides a comprehensive review of experimental research on these three canonical contests. First, we review studies investigating the basic structure of contests, including the number of players and prizes, spillovers and externalities, heterogeneity, risk and incomplete information. Second, we discuss dynamic contests and multi-battle contests. Then we review studies examining sabotage, feedback, bias, collusion, alliances, group contests and gender, as well as field experiments. Finally, we discuss applications of contests and suggest directions for future research.
The Rule of Law and the Perils of Precedent

In a world where circumstances never changed and where every judicial decision was unassailably correct, applying the doctrine of stare decisis would be a breeze. Fidelity to precedent and commitment to sound legal interpretation would meld into a single, coherent enterprise. That world, alas, is not the one we live in. Like so much else in law, the concept of stare decisis encompasses a series of trade-offs. Prominent among them is the tension between allowing past decisions to remain settled and establishing a body of legal rules that is flexible enough to adapt and improve over time.Notwithstanding pervasive disagreement over the application of stare decisis to particular disputes, the doctrine is well established in American jurisprudence. Indeed, the Supreme Court has gone so far as to describe stare decisis as indispensable to the rule of law. But as Jeremy Waldron skillfully reminds us, justifying the doctrine requires more than platitudes. In a recent article, Professor Waldron concentrates on developing what we might think of as the rule-of-law case for precedent. Central to his project is the recognition that rule-of-law benefits arise at several distinct points along the path from initial ruling to subsequent application.In this brief essay, I wish to build on Professor Waldron’s thoughtful analysis by saying something more about the other side of stare decisis. The rule-of-law benefits of stare decisis are invariably accompanied by rule-of-law costs. In light of those costs, the ultimate question is not whether there are ways in which stare decisis promotes the rule of law. Rather, it is whether stare decisis advances the rule of law on net. Some departures from precedent can promote the rule of law, and some reaffirmances can impair it. Even if the rule of law were the only value that mattered, excessive fidelity to flawed precedents would be cause for concern. That rule-of-law ambivalence, I will suggest, should be brought to bear in calibrating the strength of deference that judicial precedents receive.
Diabetic Risk Taking: The Role of Information, Education and Medication

Diet adherence is a key determinant in minimizing the risk of diabetic health complications. Diabetics who ignore their doctor's advice, concerning diet, smoking and exercise, are taking a gamble. Food product innovation, improved understanding about the benefits of tight diabetic compliance, and increased information dissemination all provide incentives for diabetics to modify their behavior. This paper uses repeated cross-sections of the NHANES from 1971–1994 to document that diabetics are making better choices over time relative to earlier cohorts and relative to non-diabetics. They smoke less than their non-diabetic counterparts. Their consumption of cholesterol has fallen sharply and they are reducing their alcohol and sweets consumption. New medications have played an important role in improving diabetic quality of life. This paper studies whether access to improved diabetic medicine has created offsetting incentives such that diet compliance falls. I find little evidence that the more medicated display worse health habits.
Health Care Issues Affecting People with an Intersex Condition or DSD: Sex or Disability Discrimination?

People with an intersex condition or a Difference of Sex Development (DSD) depend on health care professionals for critical medical treatment. Many intersex activists assert that some current medical practices are not in the best interests of patients with an intersex condition. They contend that greater safeguards should be adopted to ensure that the rights to liberty and autonomy of people with a DSD are respected. Thus far, intersex advocacy has focused on extralegal strategies. The movement is at a point, however, where legal challenges to current medical protocols could provide an additional tool to improve life altering health care practices.This Article examines whether the intersex movement could effectively use legal frameworks developed by feminists, the LGBT movement, and disability activists to advance its goal of modifying current medical procedures that are based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, and disability stereotypes.
The role of top management teams in formulating and implementing turnaround strategies: a review and research agenda

Both business commentators and scholarly researchers have acknowledged the key role that top management teams (TMTs) play in reversing the fortunes of failing firms. Nonetheless, relatively few empirical studies have investigated the importance of TMTs in turnaround situations. To encourage such studies, we draw upon the multiple theories employed in TMT research as a guide to review studies that have examined how TMTs formulate and implement turnaround strategies. Based on this review, we highlight TMT topics that have received limited attention in the turnaround literature and, thus, represent opportunities for future research. We conclude by discussing methodological issues that should be considered when examining a TMT’s role in a turnaround situation.
Are intellectual property rights unfair

Abstract If redistribution is distortionary, and if the income of skilled workers is due to knowledge-intensive activities and depends positively on intellectual property, a social planner which cares about income distribution may in principle want to use a reduction in intellectual property rights (IPRs) rather than redistributive transfers. On the one hand, such a reduction reduces static inefficiency. On the other hand, standard redistribution also reduces the level of R and D because it distorts occupational choice. We study this possibility in the context of a model with horizontal innovation, where the government, in addition to taxes and transfers, controls the fraction of innovations that are granted patents. The model predicts that standard redistribution always dominates limitations to IPRs.
Interface: The Push and Pull of Patents

Patents, and the profits they enable, exert a tangible "pull" on university research. Influenced by commercial interests, universities may favor research pathways that generate appropriable (i.e., patentable) results, thus diverting resources away from basic research. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that revenue maximization constitutes the overriding goal of most university technology transfer offices. Commercial interests are also influencing university research in a different way, as the rush to patent biomedical research tools may inhibit academic science. Amidst these legitimate concerns, this essay explores an underappreciated, salutary facet of university patenting. While such patenting may accelerate the commercialization of academic science, it also creates opportunities for academic institutions to project their unique normative commitments into the marketplace. In this sense, patents function as interfaces that mediate two-way normative exchange between academics and industry. Increasingly, universities are utilizing patents to "push" a number of nonmarket goals into the private sector, such as ensuring wide access to patented resources for research and public health purposes. Among other effects, these efforts are increasing the availability of patented research tools for noncommercial investigations as well as expanding access to essential medicines in low-income countries. The essay concludes by exploring the normative implications of the push and pull of patents. Eschewing once-size-fits-all prescriptions, it suggests that the unique histories, constituencies, and aspirations of particular institutions should inform their approach to technology transfer.
Truth or consequences?: Commercial free speech vs. public health promotion (at the FDA).

Fundamental tensions obviously exist between constitutional protections of commercial speech and efforts to safeguard the public's health. The First Amendment values autonomy, while public health promotion often reflects paternalistic impulses, not trusting citizens to make sensible lifestyle choices. In other domains where constitutional rights may conflict with public health efforts, the Supreme Court has shown a degree of flexibility. In commercial speech cases, however, it has become far less willing to find a middle ground; the Court's increasingly stringent application of Central Hudson's nexus prongs has effectively narrowed the range of substantial government interests that ultimately can pass muster. This symposium contribution focuses on efforts by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to restrict the flow of information about medical technologies to physicians and patients. As it happens, the Supreme Court's first and last words on commercial speech protections have involved advertising by professionals who dispense prescription drugs, but the pharmacy compounding case Thompson v. Western States Medical Center, 535 U.S. 357 (2002), has received scant attention from commentators. Only after cutting through the majority's simplistic description of (or perhaps failure to comprehend) the FDA's complex regulatory regime can one appreciate the potentially far-reaching consequences of that decision, especially the Court's sub silentio application of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine in an intermediate scrutiny case. The robust version of commercial free speech doctrine that seems to prevail today could profoundly impinge upon the government's preferred methods for promoting the public's health. Insofar as it has gone beyond simply guarding against the dissemination of false or misleading information and seeks to promote broader public health goals (such as dampening excess demand for potentially hazardous products), the FDA must confront the Court's increasingly clear message that paternalistic speech regulation invariably offends the Constitution.
Giving credits where credit’s not due?

For those who are overly enamored of the MBA credential, this book is an overly lengthy but important wakeup call. Mintzberg is right that it is wrong to put a newly minted MBA, without prior management experience, directly into a significant management position. But this is not nearly as common a happenstance nor as large a threat to humanity as Mintzberg's drawn-out attack on it implies. Moreover, the IMPM, and his admittedly biased portrayal of it, serves as a great case study of an alternative means of providing management training to well-experienced managers, but it is neither an effective replacement for the analytical training in the conventional MBA, nor is it salvation for our "society of meanness" (p. 153), wherein we have "antisocial behavior below the surface of public awareness yet above the letter of the law" (p. 152). It is just an exciting but yet unproven way to develop experienced managers from those firms that can afford it, to be provided by those schools that can support it. Let's not read too much more into it just yet.
The Book as Authoritative Sign in Seventeenth-Century England: A Review Through the Lens of Holistic Media Theory

Seventeenth-century England is primarily a textual era for legal authority, but the book also has the capacity to act as sign, and in a few notable instances it does so, providing authority to check both royal prerogative and parliamentary power during the Interregnum. Although its precise meaning is debated, royal ­prerogative includes the right of the monarch to act as a higher court than common law courts and may encompass the right to legislate. It was the central issue in the ­seventeenth-century power struggle between English courts, parliament, and the monarchy.
Social capital, lobbying and community-based interest groups

Recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on its role in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability. Consequently, two areas of inquiry remain underexplored: (1) the role social capital plays in facilitating lobbying and rent seeking, and (2) the possibility that the availability of government resources can cause community-based groups to re-orient their stocks of social capital away from mutual assistance and toward lobbying and rent seeking. This article examines the relationship between social capital and lobbying in New Orleans’s post-Katrina recovery.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act as Confirmation of Recent Trends in Director and Officer Fiduciary Obligations

This Article argues that, instead of dramatically altering the responsibilities of corporate officers and directors, Sarbanes-Oxley confirms at least some case law and other recent articulations of management's fiduciary duty. At a minimum, recent allegations regarding corporate misconduct may suggest some degree of confusion on the pat of corporate officers and directors about the manner in which they should comply with their fiduciary duty. By requiring more exacting standards of conduct from these corporate agents, Sarbanes-Oxley may not only clear up that confusion, but also may represent a natural extension of recent pronouncements by Delaware courts, the SEC and other bodies regarding the need for more enhanced standards of conduct.
Have Cities Shifted to Outcome‐Oriented Performance Reporting?—A Content Analysis of City Budgets

“Outcome” orientation has been emphasized in performance measurement and reporting in recent years. Using budgetary documents of the largest cities in the United States, this paper analyzes more than 4,800 performance measures reported by 21 cities to show that clear progress toward outcome-oriented performance measurement has been made. It also shows that the selection of performance measures differs among types of municipal services and is driven partly by professionalism in city management and the influence of professional organizations. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the findings and potential future improvements of performance reporting.
State, Sovereignty, and the People: A Comparison of the “Rule of Law” in China and India

This paper uses the concept of the “rule of law” to compare Qing China and British India. Rather than using the rule of law instrumentally, the paper embeds it in the histories of state power and sovereignty in China and India. Three themes, all framed by the rule of law and the rule of man as oppositional yet paradoxically intertwined notions, organize the paper's comparisons: the role of a discourse of law in simultaneously legitimizing and constraining the political authority of the state; the role of law and legal procedures in shaping and defining society; and the role of law in defining an economic and social order based on contract, property, and rights. A fourth section considers the implications of these findings for the historical trajectories of China and India in the twentieth century. Taking law as an instrument of power and an imagined realm that nonetheless also transcended power and operated outside its ambit, the paper seeks to broaden the history of the “rule of law” beyond Euro-America.
“It is a long time between drinks”: The friendship of Frank H. Knight and Frederick D. Kershner

Introduction to the publication of the correspondence of Frank Knight and Fred Kershner, Knight's longtime mentor and friend. The paper follows the punctuated chronology of the correspondence, covering the early years after their departures from Milligan College, their interaction during their close proximity in Iowa during the 1920s, the intense interchanges about religion and Christian ethics during the early 1940s, and their final letters before Kershner's death in the early 1950s.
Market and Public Liquidity

As the record of Federal Reserve interventions over the past year, from December 2007 to December 2008, makes abundantly clear, a foremost concern of monetary authorities in responding to the financial crisis has been to avoid a repeat of the Great Depression, and especially a repeat of the monetary contraction that Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz (1963) have claimed as the major cause of the 1930s Depression. The Fed has shown tremendous resourcefulness and inventiveness in its liquidity injections, considerably widening the collateral eligible under the discount window and the term auction facility, and setting up new programs targeted at primary dealers, the commercial paper market, and money market funds. At the same time it has stepped in to offer guarantees on assets held by some financial institutions (e.g., Citigroup) to avoid their bankruptcy (see David Enrich et al. 2008). This unprecedented intervention has had the intended effect of averting a major systemic financial meltdown and it has kept some critical financial institutions afloat. Yet, until now, banks have mostly responded by cutting new lending and hoarding liquidity, so that the ultimate goal of forestalling a credit crunch has not been achieved. For the most part, banks also are still holding most of the toxic assets that Monetary Policy, liquidity, and Financial crises †
Executive Compensation and Income Inequality

This Article explores the connection between exorbitant executive compensation and the growing income inequality in our country. It discusses the traditional legal attempts to rein in corporate remuneration as well as the more recent “Say-on-Pay” right given to shareholders in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. The Article concludes that negative stockholder votes can be evidence that directors have breached their fiduciary duties by granting overly generous pay hikes to their top officials. * Daniel J. Morrissey is a professor and former dean at Gonzaga University Law School. This Article is dedicated to Msgr. Franklyn Casale, the president of St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida, a good friend to the author and to many others. The author wishes to thank his student research assistants Lin Sun and Daniel Rosenbaum for their fine help in the preparation of this Article. 2 WILLIAM & MARY BUSINESS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 4:001
János Kornai, the Austrians, and the political and economic analysis of socialism

What is the relationship between central planning, pervasive shortages, and soft budget constraints under socialism? In this paper, we address this question by exploring the evolution of Janos Kornai’s work on the operation of real-world socialism. In doing so, our goal is to reframe Kornai’s contributions to the political economy of socialism by focusing on the epistemic conditions under non-market decision making. From this perspective, we argue that the dysfunction facing socialist economies is not one based fundamentally on a misalignment of incentives in enforcing hard budget constraints and eliminating shortages. Rather, soft budget constraints are a consequence of competition between firms in a non-profit setting, utilized as a means to monetize the control over state-owned resources through the creation of pervasive shortages.
William H. Rehnquist: A Life Lived Greatly, and Well

Chief Justice Rehnquist leaves behind a formidable and important legacy in constitutional law. His work on the Court was animated and guided by the view that We the People, through our Constitution, have authorized our federal courts, legislators, and administrators to do many things - but not everything. Because the Nation's powers are few and defined, Congress may not pursue every good idea or smart policy, nor should courts invalidate every foolish or immoral one. However, for those of us who knew, worked with, learned from, and cared about William Rehnquist, it is his unassuming manner, the care he took to put people at ease, and his evident desire to serve as a teacher and mentor, as well as judge and employer, that are as salient in our memories of him as, say, his re-invigoration of the first principles of our federalism. For more than three decades, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist served well the country and the Constitution. Put simply, and in Oliver Wendell Holmes's powerful words, "he live[d] greatly in the law". To his credit, though, Rehnquist's ambition was not so much to be great, but to live well.
An Examination of Heterogeneous Beliefs with a Short-Sale Constraint in a Dynamic Economy

We study the effects of a market-wide short-sale constraint in a dynamic economy with heterogeneous beliefs. Imposing the constraint reduces the stock price if the optimistic investors' intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) is less than one and increases the stock price if the optimist's IES is greater than one. In calibrated examples, the optimist's market price of risk falls and the interest rate rises when the constraint binds. Imposing the constraint leads to a higher stock volatility if the optimist's IES is less than one and a lower stock volatility if the IES is greater than one. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.
The Supreme Court and Voting Rights: A More Complete Exit Strategy

To the great relief of many observers, the Supreme Court has recently become more deferential to state legislatures with respect to their political redistricting plans. The only problem is that the Court appears to be in no mood to revisit some of the cases that got it entangled in the political thicket to begin with - the ones rigorously applying the one person, one vote standard. Indeed, it recently issued a summary affirmance of a lower court decision that tightened up its already exacting standards regarding population equality. As a result, the Court's partial retreat from politics is doing more harm than good, as it is abdicating its responsibility to protect minority voters but leaving certain constitutional rules intact that limit the ability of Congress or the states to do so. For that and other reasons, the Court should make its exit from politics more complete by relaxing its application of the one person, one vote requirement in many situations.
Accession and Original Ownership

Although first possession is generally assumed to be the dominant means of establishing original ownership of property, there is a second but less studied principle for initiating ownership, called accession, which awards new resources to the owner of existing property most prominently connected to the new resource. Accession applies across a wide variety of areas, from determining rights to baby animals and growing crops to determining ownership of derivative rights under intellectual property laws. Accession shares common features with first possession, in that both principles assign ownership uniquely in a way that imposes minimal information cost burdens on society. But accession differs from first possession in that it does not presuppose that rights are established in an open access commons and does not require the performance of an act to establish ownership. These features of accession make it, as a rule, more efficient than first possession, at least where property rights are thick and securely enforced. More broadly, accession can be seen as the critical legal principle that generates the internalization function of property, insofar as gains and losses attributable to the management of resources are automatically assigned to the most prominently connected property by accession. Although the story of accession is generally a positive one from an efficiency perspective, it may be more problematic from several normative perspectives, which are briefly considered.
A New Multiple Stellar System in the Solar Neighborhood

Adaptive optics–corrected images obtained with the Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics instrument at the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope show the presence of two subarcsecond companions to the nearby (d = 19.3 pc) young star GJ 900, which was previously classified as a single member of the IC 2391 supercluster. The two companions are redder than the primary and share the same proper motion. The projected separations of B and C from the primary are 10 and 14.5 AU, respectively. The estimated masses for the two new companions depend strongly on the age of the system. For the range of ages found in the literature for IC 2391 supercluster members (from 35 to 200 Myr), the expected masses range from 0.2 to 0.4 M⊙ for the B component and from 0.09 to 0.22 M⊙ for the C component. The determination of the dynamic mass of the faintest component of GJ 900 will yield the age of the system using theoretical evolutionary tracks. The apparent separations of the GJ 900 system components meet the observational criterion for an unstable Trapezium-type system, but this could be a projection effect. Further observations are needed to establish the nature of this interesting low-mass multiple system.
Inevitable recidivism--the origin and centrality of an urban legend.

Abstract This paper examines the pervasive conviction that sex offenders – particularly child molesters – will continue to re-offend. This belief in inevitable recidivism turns out to be absolutely essential to both the justification for, and the structure of, the sexually violent predator laws. When actual evidence of sex offender recidivism is examined, however, a huge gap exists between what is assumed and what the data actually show because most sex offenders do not in fact re-offend. Thus there is a galaxy of sexually violent predator laws and an entire branch of Supreme Court jurisprudence that is founded upon a demonstrable urban legend.
Bankruptcy Markets: Making Sense of Claims Trading

The creation of a market in bankruptcy claims is the single most important development in the bankruptcy world since the Bankruptcy Code’s enactment in 1978. Claims trading has revolutionized bankruptcy by making it a much more market-driven process. The limited scholarly literature on claims trading, however, while recognizing its radical impact, has either focused on doctrinal issues or used claims trading as a touchstone for the “Great Normative Bankruptcy Debate” about whether bankruptcy should be a market process or a safe-harbor from the market. The result is that scholarly treatments of claims trading have operated with a high level of generality and scant evidentiary basis. This Article argues that a more productive approach to claims trading must begin with a better understanding of its nuances. It shows that claims trading is a complex, multi-dimensional, and dynamic market with tremendous variation by timing, asset class, and trading motivation, and with different impacts on the bankruptcy reorganization process. Accordingly, the Article challenges the claim of Professors Douglas G. Baird and Robert K. Rasmussen that claims trading, along with other financial innovations, is detrimental to the bankruptcy process by creating an anticommons problem. The Article questions key assumptions underlying Baird and Rasmussen’s argument and suggests that rather than wreaking havoc on the bankruptcy process, claims trading might facilitate more efficient bankruptcy negotiations and help reorganizations. In the abstract, however, claims trading’s net social welfare impact is indeterminate, and empirical examination is not possible because of the incomplete nature of claims trading disclosure requirements, which expose only changes in legal title, not economic interest. Given the complexity of the claims trading market and our limited knowledge of its operations and impact, regulatory approaches to claims trading should be narrowly targeted and noninvasive. A start would be to improve market efficiency by increasing unsophisticated creditors’ awareness of their claims trading options and by enhancing price disclosure to market participants through mechanisms like electronic quotation bulletin boards.
Stolen Valor: A Historical Perspective on the Regulation of Military Uniform and Decorations

This Note traces the roots of the Stolen Valor Act (SVA) to medieval sumptuary laws and laws regulating the use of heraldry. I argue that like these historical laws, the SVA operates as a social ordering mechanism. Military uniforms and decorations are regulated because of their communicative value. By showing how the law has evolved and how the government has presented its interest in the law throughout the twentieth century, I uncover the functions of the law and the reasons for its passage. The SVA was passed in order to appease a politically sympathetic interest group, veterans, at little to no cost to the federal government. It insures the government’s investment in its military labor force, protects public safety, and prevents the honor associated with military awards from being diluted, or stolen.
The Extinction of Nation-States

Hugo Grotius founded his theory of international law on the concept of territorial sovereignty. Over the centuries, territorial sovereignty has played a key role in the development of international legal order. The world has now been divided into nearly two hundred nation-states. The people are proud of their national identities and are willing to sacrifice their lives for their beloved nation-state. But just as dinosaurs have disappeared from the face of the earth, so will nation-states with sovereign borders. One Earth will rise again, free from the walls and fences that nations are building around their unsustainable sovereignty.
Congressional Alternatives in the Wake of City of Boerne v. Flores: The (Limited) Role of Congress in Protecting Religious Freedom from State and Local Infringement

This article discusses and analyzes City of Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court's 1997 decision invalidating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) as applied to state and local governments, and it explores a variety of ways in which Congress might respond to Boerne with legislation that might survive constitutional scrutiny. In particular, the article addresses the following statutory possibilities: more narrowly tailored legislation grounded on Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment; RFRA-like legislation grounded on Congress's power over interstate commerce or its power to implement treaties; and spending-power legislation imposing RFRA-like conditions on the receipt of federal funding by state and local governments. Based on an analysis of constitutional doctrine and a consideration of relevant constitutional policies, the article concludes that spending-power legislation might be not only the safest congressional response to Boerne, but also the most sensible and appropriate.
The governance and performance of Xerox’s technology spin-off companies

Abstract Companies that conduct internal research cannot fully specify the output from that research in advance. Inevitably, spillovers may result. A company might choose to create a technology spin-off company to realize value from such research spillovers. But how is such a spin-off to be governed? Effective spin-off governance structures in a highly uncertain environment must promote experimentation and adaptation, in order to unlock the latent value in a technology. These can conflict with structures intended to manage coordination with the parent firm’s complementary assets. This paper analyses 35 spin-off organizations that arose from the Xerox Corporation. Xerox’s own initial equity position is negatively correlated with the subsequent performance of its spin-offs, but this is due not to their equity per se, but Xerox’s practices in managing its spin-offs. Spin-offs with a higher percentage of venture capital investors on their Boards were associated with higher financial performance, while spin-offs with a Xerox insider as CEO were associated with lower financial performance. Qualitative interview data suggest that Xerox’s practices caused its spin-offs to search locally near Xerox’s own business, while spin-offs governed by outside investors’ practices searched a broader space for commercializing their technologies.
Voluntary Association in Public Goods Experiments: Reciprocity, Mimicry and Efficiency*

We find that a process of voluntary association where individuals express a preference about whom they want to be associated with can create strong incentives to increase efficiency and contributions in provision of a public good. This process of endogenous group formation perfectly sorted contributions by the order of group formation. Comparison of middle and last period behaviour suggests that a majority of the subject population are conditional cooperators, with a minority of monetary payoff maximisers. The experiment illustrates that under favourable conditions, where the opportunities of entry and exit are symmetrically balanced, a process of voluntary association can mitigate the free-rider problem. In the filming of the Coen brothersThe Man Who Wasn’t There, a new production company of three hundred people came into being. Nine months later, when the filming was finished, the company, Pompadour Pictures, disappeared. Parts of it regrouped into production companies for a next generation of films, along with individuals from other newly extinct production companies. This pattern, which is standard in the film industry, makes sense because the next production might call for a different mix of tasks and skills. The process of regrouping also makes sense in its incentives ‐ individuals have an incentive to establish reputations for being productive and cooperative workers, giving them a chance to join better groups later. The more experienced and established people from a just liquidated production company, for example a director of the art department, are typically given slots to fill, and they fill them with the most promising assistants from the old production company. The film industry is an extreme example of associations that form for a limited time and then are reconstituted. With varying degrees of voluntary entry and exit, and also different degrees of reliance upon internal sanctions against shirking group members, other examples include law partnerships, academic departments, athletic teams and virtually all firms. In response to the risk of free-riding, teams attempt to select members with good reputations and weed out others who fail to pull their weight. In practical life, endogenous group formation is a much used mechanism to mitigate free-rider problems.
Domestic Bonds, Credit Derivatives, and the Next Transformation of Sovereign Debt

Not long ago, financial markets in most poor and middle-income countries were shallow to nonexistent, and closed to foreigners. Governments often had to rely on risky borrowing abroad; the private sector had even fewer options. But between 1995 and 2005, domestic debt in the emerging markets grew from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. In Mexico, domestic debt went from just over 20% of the total government debt stock in 1995 to nearly 80% in 2007. Foreign and local investors are buying. Over the same period, derivative contracts to transfer emerging market credit risk surpassed the market capitalization of the benchmark bond index. The growth of domestic bonds and risk transfer technology makes the emerging markets look more mature, or mainstream. Yet a closer look at recent changes suggests that the popular rhetoric of mainstreaming and convergence obscures more than it reveals. Emerging and mainstream markets may share participants and use similar instruments, but this formal resemblance rarely stands for substantive identity. Instead, investors use the same instruments differently in different markets, which, as the examples in the text suggest, can be its own source of risk. Law scholarship has yet to engage with the shift from foreign-law, foreign-currency to local-law, local-currency bonds and the rise of credit derivatives in the emerging markets. This symposium essay maps the ongoing transformation to highlight gaps between formal and substantive convergence of emerging and mainstream markets, and suggest implications for governance, risk management and future research.
Causality between Public Debt and Real Growth in the OECD: A Country-by-country Analysis

We analyze the direction of causality between public debt and real economic growth in a sample of 20 OECD countries for a period of 40 years starting in 1970. Given the persistence of real growth rates, we estimate canonical cointegrating regressions to allow for the possibility of stochastic cointegrating vectors. We then make inferences about the direction of causality by means of both Granger tests and VAR-based tests that do not depend on whether the series are integrated or cointegrated. We find that while modern welfare states tend to face low real growth following increases in public debt, more traditional welfare states and those with larger governments typically exhibit either causality from low growth to debt accumulation or bidirectional causality. However, the heterogeneity of the results suggests caution when making general statements about the relationship between these variables. In particular, the causal link is intrinsic to each country and it cannot be inferred that higher debt always leads to lower economic growth.
Shareholder Eugenics in the Public Corporation

In a world of active, empowered shareholders, the match between shareholders and public corporations can potentially affect firm value. This article examines the extent to which publicly held corporations can shape their shareholder base. Two sorts of approaches are available: direct/recruitment strategies; and shaping or socialization strategies. Direct/recruitment strategies through which “good” shareholders are attracted to the firm include: going public; targeted placement of shares; traditional investor relations; the exploitation of clientele effects; and de-recruitment. “Shaping” or “socialization” strategies in which shareholders of a “bad” or unknown type are transformed into shareholders of the “good” type include: choice of domicile; choice of stock exchange; the new “strategic” investor relations; and capital structure. For each type of strategy, I consider the extent to which corporate and securities law facilitates or interferes with the strategy, as well as the ways in which it controls abuse. In paying close attention to the relationship between shareholder base and firms, this article attempts to merge investor relations, very broadly construed, with corporate governance.
STRATEGIC RESPONSES TO THE POLICE AMONG INNER-CITY YOUTH

Research on police–citizen relations is largely focused on how police officers treat citizens, with much less attention given to how citizens behave toward officers. Several studies report that citizens' demeanor affects the way they are treated by police, but researchers have neglected the larger question of how citizens manage their contacts with officers more generally, outside the parameters of face-to-face encounters. The question is particularly salient for young males living in high-crime, inner-city neighborhoods—many of whom have frequent, negative contacts with or observations of the police. This article examines the contours of the youths' strategic responses to the police, drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in disadvantaged neighborhoods in St. Louis. Our analysis draws on Hirschman's framework of exit, voice, and loyalty as options available to individuals when dealing with problematic organizations.
Is There a Lingua Franca for the American Legal Academy

This chapter examines translation between languages within the legal academy, evaluating the push for rational choice as a kind of lingua franca for law professors as opposed to the traditional "vernacular" provided by legal doctrinal language. The paper suggests that for much of the American legal academy in the last generation, the language of law-and-economics and rational choice bears the same relationship to the language of legal doctrine (including what is left of law French) as French did to Russian for most Russian aristocrats. In other words, whether or not there is a lingua franca in the legal academy, there is a vernacular, which is the language of doctrine. While rational choice has gained widespread acceptance as a language among some law professors, insights from other disciplines have been more selectively incorporated, in the process often losing the distinct trace of their original disciplinary settings.
Skin color, physical appearance, and perceived discriminatory treatment

Abstract This paper examines the relation between observer-ratings of attractiveness and skin tone, weight, and height, and provides evidence on whether these physical characteristics affect the likelihood that individuals report discriminatory treatment in a variety of contexts. African Americans with lighter color, and white men with darker color, are rated as more attractive, as are taller men and both men and women of normal weight. Although a vast literature indicates that physical appearance influences how one is treated, there is little evidence that perceived discriminatory treatment is related to physical characteristics such as attractiveness, weight, or height. An exception is for African Americans with lighter skin color who report less discriminatory treatment in daily activities and on the basis of color.
Murky Immigration Law and the Challenges Facing Immigration Removal and Benefits Adjudication

Immigration adjudication is more diverse than it may seem. Scholars tend to focus on one aspect of administrative immigration adjudication, the decision-making process established to determine whether an individual may be removed (deported) from the United States. But there is a whole other function of administrative immigration adjudication that relatively is ignored in the legal literature. Immigration adjudicators are also tasked with determining whether to grant immigration benefits, such as whether to grant lawful permanent resident (green card) status. Both types of administrative immigration adjudication, removal and benefits, are in crisis. This article explores the challenges facing each and argues that both crises are linked to a lack of transparency in immigration law. In the removal context, the lack of transparency is exemplified by the complexity of the law and by the negative discretion infused into the law. In the benefits context, the lack of transparency is exemplified by the use of administrative guidance to adjudicate benefits applications and by the obscurity of the administrative appellate adjudicating body, the Administrative Appeals Office. This lack of transparency presents big challenges for both removal and benefits adjudication, and once recognized, opens new lines of inquiry. In the removal context, the lack of transparency: (1) must be considered as a contributor to overwhelming caseloads; (2) highlights a lack of decisional independence for immigration adjudicators; (3) must be considered as a factor in the extreme lack of lawyers in the system; and (4) adds to the negative mystique surrounding immigration law. In the benefits context, the use of administrative guidance and the obscurity of the Administrative Appeals Office help to explain the confusion, uncertainty and extreme lack of confidence characteristic of the benefits adjudication system. The opacity of immigration law presents challenges to both removal and benefits adjudication. This connection suggests that the lack of transparency in immigration law is a broad and deep problem, and that this murkiness must be considered in crafting any reform.
Climate Change Adaptation: A Collective Action Perspective on Federalism Considerations

The buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the likely growth in future emissions due to increased energy consumption in developing nations have convinced many scientists and policymakers of the need to develop policies that will allow adaptation to minimize the adverse effects of climate change. Climate change adaptation is designed to increase the resilience of natural and human ecosystems to the threats posed by a changing environment. Although an extensive literature concerning the federalism implications of climate change mitigation policy has developed, less has been written about the federalism issues arising from climate change adaptation policy. This Article provides a framework for determining how to structure a policy to facilitate adaptation to climate change that assigns appropriate roles to all levels of government. In particular, the Article addresses three questions. First, when is participation by the federal government in directing climate change adaptation policy appropriate? Second, should the federal government set a floor that requires participation, or at least conformance with federal requirements, by states and localities? Third, should the federal government ever displace state and local adaptation responses based on the threats they pose to federal interests? Collective action principles can assist in answering these questions and determining the proper institutional arrangements for dealing with climate change adaptation. It is inevitable that clashes of interest will develop between jurisdictions when desired resources are scarce or efforts by one jurisdiction to avoid the undesirable aspects of climate change shift the burden of those changes to other jurisdictions. These conflicts are likely to arise both when states and localities fail to do enough to anticipate and react to climate change and when they do “too much.” In these instances, federal intervention is desirable. The presence of
Imperfect Competition, Information Heterogeneity, and Financial Contagion

This study examines how heterogeneity of private information may induce financial contagion. Using a model of multi-asset trading in which the three main channels of contagion through financial linkages in the literature (correlated information, correlated liquidity, and portfolio rebalancing) are ruled out by construction, I show that financial contagion can still be an equilibrium outcome when speculators receive heterogeneous fundamental information. Risk-neutral speculators trade strategically across many assets to mask their information advantage about one asset. Asymmetric sharing of information among them prevents rational market makers from learning about their individual signals and trades with sufficient accuracy. Incorrect cross-inference about terminal payoffs and contagion ensue. When used to analyze the transmission of shocks across countries, my model suggests that the process of generation and disclosure of information in emerging markets may explain their vulnerability to financial contagion (JEL D82, G14, G15).