cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The New Way of War: Is There A Duty to Use Drones?

Drones have become the poster child for America’s continuing fight against terrorism under President Obama, playing the role that torture had occupied during the Bush administration: a morally, legally, and politically controversial issue that drives a wedge between the United States and much of the rest of the world. Covert drone attacks orchestrated by the CIA around the world, including in areas that lie outside recognized war zones, raise a range of difficult questions that have been heavily debated by scholars, policy-makers and in the general media. However, that discussion has focused on whether states have the legal right to deploy drones and to use them. Little attention has been given to the use by the military of drones to carry out attacks in battlefield zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya and to the question whether a legal duty exists or ought to exist obligating states that possess drone technology to use that technology on the battlefield. The central claim of the article is that such a duty can, in fact, be derived from the cardinal principles of the law of armed conflict. It suggests that such an interpretation is merited if we accept that drones combine remote use of accurate force that reduces lethality both among friendly forces and innocent civilians. Drones are not, per se, unlawful under LOAC. Rather the critical question is the same for drones as for other types of weapons, i.e., whether the specific use of the weapon complies with LOAC. In this context, the weapon must be deployed in accordance with LOAC’s fundamental principles of humanity, proportionality, distinction, taking precautions, and military necessity. The article applies the general principles of LOAC to drones in three stages. It analyzes the general trajectories of weapons’ development throughout human history, trading off three main considerations, namely distance, accuracy and lethality. It then examines the rise of precision-guided munitions as an attempt to balance these three considerations, increasing military efficiency while minimizing harm to civilians and civilian objects. Looking at drones through the prism of that analysis, the article discusses drones as a combination of remote use of accurate force that reduces lethality and closely examines both the promise that the use of drones may bring to the battlefield as well as the challenges to their deployment. Coming back to the question of whether states and their military commanders have an obligation to use drones in the context of an armed conflict, the articles that although there are no treaties that deal specifically with the use of drones in armed conflict and no customary norms obligating the use of drones, such a duty may be derived, by way of nuanced interpretation, from the cardinal principles of the law of armed conflict. Such a nuanced interpretation is merited if we accept that drones offer the possibility of a more humane war by combining remote, distant use of accurate force that reduces lethality both among friendly forces and innocent civilians.
Tax distortions and bond issue pricing

Abstract Original issue premium (OIP) bonds are the norm in the US tax-exempt market but very rare in the taxable market. A tax subsidy helps explain this disparity. Unlike bonds issued at par or discount, the price of OIP bonds can fall and yet remain above par, providing secondary market buyers with more tax-exempt coupon and less taxable market discount gain. The subsidy for OIP bonds explains additional, previously undocumented empirical facts. In a calibration exercise, the subsidy’s expected cost to the U.S. Treasury is estimated at $1.7 billion per year.
NAFTA's Trojan Horse & the Demise of the Mexican Hog Industry

In late March 2009, a five-year-old boy in La Gloria, Mexico came down with the flu. This typically unremarkable event took on significance when, two weeks later, over 800 people in nearby Perote also became sick and the little boy was labeled "patient zero" of the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic.2 Epidemiologists from around the world converged on Perote Valley, as 60% of Perote's citizens eventually fell ill.3 Edgar Hernandez's mother sobbed to the Washington Post reporter that her son could not have caused this disaster.4 She and her neighbors blamed the hog factories.5 Perote, the capital of the state of Veracruz, is about 120 miles from Mexico City. Surrounded by mountains on all sides, Perote Valley is home to around 35,000 people and more than one million pigs at any given time.6 Residents have long complained about the hog factories. The odors from the massive manure cesspools baking in the sun, some less than two miles from the city of Per ote, permeate their homes, clothes, and belongings. Dust clouds of dried manure travel for miles, whipped up by the hot winds. It is
Component-Driven Regime-Switching Volatility

We develop a new class of regime-switching volatility models that are characterized by high-dimensional state spaces, parsimonious transition matrices, and ARMA dynamics for the log volatility process. This combination of features is achieved by assuming that we can decompose the Markov chain that describes regime dynamics into a number of two-state component chains that evolve independently through time. Using daily data for S&P 500 index and IBM shares, we show that our component-driven regime-switching (CDRS) models are capable of outperforming GARCH, component GARCH, regime-switching GARCH, and Markov-switching multifractal models in forecasting realized variances out of sample. Interestingly, we find that CDRS models with simple AR(1) dynamics perform well across the board. Copyright The Author, 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Learning and the value of information: Evidence from health plan report cards

This paper develops a framework to analyze the value of information in the context of health plan choice. We use a Bayesian learning model to estimate the impact and value of information using data from a large employer, which started distributing health plan ratings to its employees in 1997. We estimate the parameters of the model with simulated maximum likelihood, and use the estimates to quantify the value of the report card information. We model both continuous specifications with Gaussian priors and signals, and discrete specifications with Beta priors and Binomial signals. We find that the release of information had a statistically significant effect on health plan choices. Consumers were willing to pay about $330 per year per below expected performance rating avoided, and the average value of the report card per employee was about $20 per year. We find large variation in valuations across different performance domains, but no significant evidence of heterogeneity based on observable employee characteristics or unobservable dimensions.
Tax evasion, technology, and inequality

Ensuring compliance with the tax laws is an enduring challenge for all governments. However, the methods by which governments enforce the tax laws, and by which individuals and firms evade their taxes, change over time, due at least in part to changing technology. In this paper I examine how changing technology, especially changes driven by the transformation of information into digital formats for use by computers, seems likely to affect tax evasion in the years ahead. I argue that many of these changes in technology will improve the ability of governments to decrease tax evasion, mainly by increasing the flow of information to governments. However, I also argue that these changes in technology will open up new avenues by which some individuals and some firms can evade (and avoid) taxes. At this point it is unclear which trend will dominate, so that the effects of technology on the overall level of tax evasion are uncertain. Even so, I believe that the distributional effects of these technological changes are more predictable, given the differential effects of technology on the abilities of individuals of different levels and types of income to evade their taxes. Indeed, I argue that changing technology will make evasion increasingly difficult for most taxpayers, especially those subject to employer withholding and third party information reporting, but that evasion will be increasingly viable for a small number of taxpayers, especially very high income taxpayers. Regardless of the overall impact of technology on the level of tax evasion, I conclude that the effects of technology will likely increase economic inequality.
Capital Market Prices, Management Forecasts, and Earnings Management

ABSTRACT: I analyze a manager's optimal earnings forecasting strategy and optimal earnings management policy in a setting where both the mean and the variance of the distribution generating the firm's cash flows are unknown. The analysis shows that the equilibrium price of the firm is a function of the manager's forecast, the firm's reported earnings, and the squared error in the manager's earnings forecast. The model contains several predictions, including: (1) the manager manipulates earnings to reduce his forecast error at the earnings announcement date; (2) the firm's stock price is more sensitive to the firm's actual earnings announcement than to the manager's forecast; and (3) controlling for the level of reported earnings and the magnitude of the earnings surprise, the firm's price is higher when it has a positive surprise at the earnings announcement date than when it has a negative surprise.
Ethics, Efficiency, Coasian Property Rights, and Psychic Income: A Reply to Demsetz

In his seminal article, Coase (1960) turned the world of economics upside down. I t might even be said that with one (longish) stroke of the pen, he created the entirely new sub-discipline of Law and Economics; and that he did so out of the ashes of a t least one part of the traditional field as i t stood before his onslaught: that occupied by Pigou (1932). Previously, the view of the profession regarding invasions against another person or his property was the classical liberal one of cause and effect. A was the perpetrator, B the victim. To be sure, there was some equivocation amongst the Pigovians as to whether the proper public policy response to this was to tax A in a n effort to force him to stop his depredations, or to give him a subsidy so as to entice him toward this end (ibid., p. 184). But the
On Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders

In a multi-sender Bayesian persuasion game, Gentzkow and Kamenica (2012) show that increasing the number of senders cannot decrease the amount of information revealed. They assume: (i) senders reveal information simultaneously, (ii) senders’ information can be arbitrarily correlated, and (iii) senders play pure strategies. This paper shows that these three conditions are also necessary to the result. In sequential persuasion games, the order of moves matters, and we show that adding a sender as a first mover and keeping the order of moves fixed for the other senders cannot result in a loss of information.
The effect of alternative goals on earnings management studies: An earnings benchmark examination

Abstract Firms’ management manages earnings because they have incentives or goals to do so. Earnings management studies have to account for these different goals as tests of earnings management can be compromised by the effect of conflicting goals. I illustrate this in the setting of Dechow et al. (2003) . Their study examines whether firms with small profits and firms with small losses (loss-avoidance benchmark) have differing levels of discretionary accruals. Dechow et al. (2003) find that firms just above the loss-avoidance benchmark do not have discretionary accruals that are significantly different than firms just below the benchmark. However, they do not consider firms just below the loss-avoidance benchmark that might be using discretionary accruals to avoid missing an alternative benchmark. I find that after I consider these alternate earnings benchmark goals, firms just above the benchmark have significantly higher discretionary accruals. This provides direct evidence that the ‘kink’ in the distribution of earnings arises from earnings management. I find similar results for the earnings changes benchmark. These findings highlight the need to consider alternative earnings benchmark goals when examining firms immediately around benchmarks.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act: The Constitutional Significance of an Unconstitutional Statute

This article addresses the constitutionality and the constitutional significance of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), through which Congress, relying on Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, attempted to repudiate the Supreme Court's restrictive interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause, as announced in Employment Division v. Smith, and to adopt in its place a more generous regime of religious freedom. The article advances two major propositions. First, it contends that despite the Act's noble purpose, RFRA circumvents the process of constitutional amendment, frustrates the Supreme Court's role as the primary interpreter of the Constitution, and improperly intrudes on federalistic values. As a result, the Act exceeds the power of Congress under Section 5, at least insofar as the Act applies to state and local governmental action. Second, the article suggests that even though the Act is unconstitutional, it nonetheless is constitutionally significant in the sense that it should be relevant to the Supreme Court's own interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause. Elaborating a theory of constitutional evolution, the article claims that RFRA reflects contemporary societal values that should properly inform the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause. On this view, the Act - along with more traditional sources of constitutional meaning - could properly be used by the Supreme Court as support for the judicial adoption of a more generous interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause.
Apology and Organizations: Exploring an Example from Medical Practice

This article focuses on injuries committed by members of organizations, such as corporations, and examines distinct issues raised by apology in the organizational setting, in particular: the process of learning to prevent future errors, the divergent interests stemming from principal-agent tensions in employment, risk preferences and sources of insurance, the non-pecuniary benefits to corporate morale, productivity and reputation, the standing and scope of apologies, and the articulation of policies toward injuries to others. APOLOGY AND ORGANIZATIONS: EXPLORING AN EXAMPLE FROM MEDICAL PRACTICE
The Network Governance of Crisis Response: Case Studies of Incident Command Systems

This article examines the application of a structural innovation known as Incident Command Systems (ICS) in different crises. The ICS seeks to coordinate multiple response organizations under a temporary hierarchical structure. The ICS is of practical interest because it has become the dominant mechanism by which crisis response is organized in the United States. It is of theoretical interest because it provides insights into how a highly centralized mode of network governanceoperates.Despite thehierarchical characteristics of the ICS, thenetworkpropertiesof crisis response fundamentally affects its operations, in terms of the coordination difficulties that multiple members bring, the ways in which authority is shared and contested between members, and the importance of trust in supplementing formal modes of control.
AIDS and quarantine: the revival of an archaic doctrine.

This Article, written in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, explored the historical evolution of the law of quarantine in an attempt to uncover its development through prior understandings of disease, science, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The Article then took initial steps toward placing the law of quarantine in the context of the then-current legal doctrine and analyzing its applicability to the early stages of the AIDS epidemic.
Interest rates and investment coordination failures

The theory of capital developed by Bohm-Bawerk and Wicksell emphasized the roundabout nature of the production process. The basic insight is that production necessarily involves time. One element of the production process is to determine the period of production, or the length of time from the start of production to its completion. Bohm-Bawerk and Wicksell emphasized the role of the interest rate in determining the period of production. In this paper, I develop an option games model of the decision to invest. Two firms have an opportunity to enter a market, but production takes time. Firms face a two-dimensional decision. Along one dimension, they determine the period of production and the prospective profit therefrom. Along another dimension, they determine whether or not they want to enter the market given the amount of time it will take to start generating revenue from production. Within this option games approach, the period of production can be understood as an endogenous time-to-build and I argue that this framework provides a tool for evaluating the claims of Bohm-Bawerk and Wicksell against the backdrop of competition and uncertainty. I evaluate the period of production decision and the option to enter decision when the real interest rate changes. I show that investment coordination failures are more likely to occur at lower levels of profitability when real interest rates are low. I conclude by discussing the implications of low interest rates for boom-bust investment cycles.
“CAN I PROFIT FROM MY OWN NAME AND LIKENESS AS A COLLEGE ATHLETE?” The Predictive Legal Analytics of a College Player’s Publicity Rights vs. First Amendment Rights of Others

This Article is focused entirely on the battle between athlete’s NIL/publicity rights and the First Amendment rights of those who use those rights in their own works or products. The aforementioned publicity rights settlements predictably do not provide any admission of liability or wrongdoing by the NCAA or any other defendants. Therefore, the primary source of legal authority and precedent on the publicity rights issues reside in the Hart and Keller opinions discussed in this Article. In the three cases of import, Keller, Hart, and O'Bannon, the athletes abided by the NCAA rules that required that they refrain from taking advantage of their relative fame through licensing their NILs or otherwise being paid in any form, directly or indirectly from the sport. In all three cases, the NCAA and its licensee partners gained substantial revenue using the NILs of the athletes. Furthermore, in all three cases the athletes did not receive proceeds from the licensing or use of their NILs from the NCAA or its partners before or after the collegiate eligibility expired. This article provides a continuum of factors that help predict when the NCAA and licensed partners no longer have prevailing First Amendment rights over the publicity rights of collegiate athletes.
Open economies work better! did Africa's protectionist policies cause its marginalization in world trade?

In the mid-1950s sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 3.1 percent of global exports. By 1990 this share had fallen to 1.2 percent. The authors of this report find that Africa's extensive loss of competitiveness played a key role in its decline in world trade. If Africa had merely retained its 1962-64 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) market shares, its exports now would be 75 percent higher. Africa's problem was two-pronged: (1) it experienced declining market shares for its major export products, which, in turn, were of declining relative importance in world trade; and (2) it was unable to diversify its export base. Empirical evidence developed by the authors shows that external protection has not played a major role in this decline; in fact, OECD trade preferences gave Africa an advantage over many exporters. Trade restrictions and domestic policy interventions often create a bias against tradables, especially exports, that prevents the achievement of otherwise attainable growth rates. Import barriers in Africa are far higher than in developing countries with faster export growth, and appear to work against potential export products. If the region is to reverse its unfavorable export trends, it must adopt trade and structural adjustment policies that help make it competitive and help African exporters capitalize on foreign trade opportunities.
The Informational Role of Stock and Bond Volume

In a Kyle (1985) model, the sign of the correlation between a firm's debt and equity returns is the same as the sign of the cross-market Kyle's lambda. The sign is positive (negative) if private information concerns the mean (risk) of the firm's assets. We show empirically that information conveyed by order flows is primarily about asset means. The cross-market lambdas are quite large; consequently, the portions of bond and stock returns explained by order flows are highly correlated, even though the order flows themselves are virtually uncorrelated.
Accounting for Growth: Comparing China and India

Through most of the twentieth century, only those in the high-income industrial countries, less than one-fifth of the world’s population, have enjoyed the fruits of economic well-being. However, since 1980, China and India have achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and poverty reduction— and taken together, these countries comprise over a third of the world’s population. The emergence of China and India as major forces in the global economy has been one of the most significant economic developments of the past quarter century. This paper examines sources of economic growth in the two countries, comparing and contrasting their experiences over the past 25 years. In many respects, China and India seem similar. Both are large geographically and have enormous populations that remain very poor. In 1980, both had extremely low per capita incomes. The World Bank and the Penn World Tables show GDP per capita for India was roughly equal to the World Bank’s 1980 average for all low-income countries, while per capita GDP for China was about two-thirds of the estimate for y Barry Bosworth is Senior Fellow and holds the Robert V. Roosa Chair, Brookings Institu
On the Role of Demand and Strategic Uncertainty in Capacity Investment and Disinvestment Dynamics

Abstract Even mature industries seldom settle down into a long-run steady state. Fluctuations in demand disrupt the status quo and call for firms to adjust their capacities on an ongoing basis. We construct a fully dynamic model of an oligopolistic industry with lumpy capacity and lumpy investment/disinvestment decisions. In addition to uncertainty about the evolution of demand, a firm faces strategic uncertainty concerning the decisions of its rivals. We numerically solve the model for its Markov-perfect equilibria. For one set of parameter values, three equilibria exist, and while all of them have simple, intuitive structures, they exhibit widely varying patterns of response to demand shocks. At one extreme, one firm dominates the industry almost as a monopolist and changes its capacity to accommodate demand. At the other extreme, the larger firm keeps its capacity nearly constant while the smaller firm acts as the swing producer.
Post-sale service and the limits of reputation

In the standard durable goods-quality model, the prospect of repeat sales often supports the provision of high-quality durable goods. When durable goods require costly post-sale service, however, a reputational equilibrium may not exist at any price, even with a flow of profitable new sales indefinitely into the future. This article characterizes the size of the premium needed to make provision of post-sale service self enforcing and then uses historical records to assess the self-enforcing post-sale service premia for United Shoe Machinery, IBM, and Xerox. Copyright 2013 The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.
Intellectual Property, Trade & Development: The State of Play

This Article considers, first, available economic, social, and cultural analyses of the impact of intellectual property protection in developing countries. Economics provides a useful set of analytical tools and are directly relevant, in particular since the successfully arranged marriage of IP and trade rules after which it became inevitable that IP rules would be measured using an economic yardstick. The Paper also considers the claim that making proper intellectual property policy is impossible or inherently unreliable because theoretical models are inadequate or valid empirical data unavailable. Against this backdrop, the Article then examines the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). TRIPS added a significant level of comfort for multinational corporations deciding when and where to export to new markets or expand research and development efforts. The Article also considers the Doha Ministerial Declaration of November 2001 and follow-up work on access to medicines. In the second Part, this Article discusses recent economic analyses of the impact of IP protection on bilateral trade flows and foreign direct investment (FDI). Wherever possible, lessons about the right level of intellectual protection for developing countries are drawn. Recent efforts in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the WTO are also discussed. In a third and final part, the Article looks at the current quest for a balanced approach and suggests ways in which such a balanced IP regime could be constructed, as part of a broad, knowledge-oriented economic development strategy.
The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relations

The attacks of September 11, 2001, highlight the general absence of attention to religion in international scholarship. The absence is understandable, for it arises from the secularized nature of the authority structure of the international system, described here as the “Westphalian synthesis.” Over the past generation, though, the global rise of public religion has challenged several planks of the synthesis. The sharpest challenge is “radical Islamic revivalism,” a political theology that has its roots in the early twentieth century and that gave rise to al-Qaeda. If international relations scholars are to understand the events of September 11, they ought to devote more attention to the way in which radical Islamic revivalism and public religion shape international relations, sometimes in dramatic ways.
Volume Dynamics and Multimarket Trading

The trading of shares of the same firm in multiple markets has become common over the last 30 years, but there is little empirical evidence on the extent to which investors actively exploit multimarket environments. We introduce a volume-based measure of multimarket trading to address this question. Analyzing a large set of cross-listed firms, we find higher multimarket trading among markets with similar designs and strong enforcement of insider trading laws and for firms with higher institutional ownership. These findings are important for firms evaluating the benefits of cross listing and for markets competing for order flow.
The Ethics of Payments: Paper, Plastic, or Bitcoin?

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman (2013)? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner.
Conditional quantile processes based on series or many regressors

Abstract Quantile regression (QR) is a principal regression method for analyzing the impact of covariates on outcomes. The impact is described by the conditional quantile function and its functionals. In this paper we develop the nonparametric QR-series framework, covering many regressors as a special case, for performing inference on the entire conditional quantile function and its linear functionals. In this framework, we approximate the entire conditional quantile function by a linear combination of series terms with quantile-specific coefficients and estimate the function-valued coefficients from the data. We develop large sample theory for the QR-series coefficient process, namely we obtain uniform strong approximations to the QR-series coefficient process by conditionally pivotal and Gaussian processes. Based on these two strong approximations, or couplings, we develop four resampling methods (pivotal, gradient bootstrap, Gaussian, and weighted bootstrap) that can be used for inference on the entire QR-series coefficient function. We apply these results to obtain estimation and inference methods for linear functionals of the conditional quantile function, such as the conditional quantile function itself, its partial derivatives, average partial derivatives, and conditional average partial derivatives. Specifically, we obtain uniform rates of convergence and show how to use the four resampling methods mentioned above for inference on the functionals. All of the above results are for function-valued parameters, holding uniformly in both the quantile index and the covariate value, and covering the pointwise case as a by-product. We demonstrate the practical utility of these results with an empirical example, where we estimate the price elasticity function and test the Slutsky condition of the individual demand for gasoline, as indexed by the individual unobserved propensity for gasoline consumption.
Does Client Importance Affect Auditor Independence at the Office Level? Empirical Evidence from Going-Concern Opinions*

This paper investigates whether client importance affects auditor independence within the local offices of audit firms. Client importance is measured as the proportion of audit fees, non-audit service fees, or total fees that a distressed, public client contributes to the total public-client revenue earned by the individual audit offices. Auditor independence is measured as the auditor's propensity to issue a going-concern opinion. The paper focuses on changes in the relation between fee ratios and auditor reporting decisions from the pre-SOX (2001) to post-SOX (2003) period. In the pre-SOX period, I do not find statistically significant association between any of the fee ratios and the auditor's propensity to issue a going concern opinion. However, in the post-SOX period, I find evidence that higher audit fee and total fee ratios are positively associated with the auditor's propensity to issue a going concern opinion. That is, post-SOX, relatively more important clients are more likely to receive a going concern opinion. These results allay concerns that auditor independence is compromised for significant clients.
Toward a new kalām cosmological argument

AbstractWilliam Lane Craig has revived interest in the medieval kalām argument to the point where it is now one of the most discussed arguments for God’s existence in the secondary literature. Still, the reception of Craig’s argument among philosophers of religion has been mostly critical. In the interest of developing an argument that more philosophers of religion would be inclined to support, I will lay the philosophical groundwork for a new kalām cosmological argument that, in contrast with Craig’s argument, does not adopt such controversial positions as the dynamic theory of time and the metaphysical impossibility of an actual infinite.
Centennial Reflections on the California Law Review 's Scholarship on Race: The Structure of Civil Rights Thought

The author reviews one hundred years of the California Law Review’s rich body of scholarship on race and civil rights in an effort to discern its general direction and contours. Discerning two broad paradigms—a black-white binary of race and a libertyequality divide—he notes that the two not only have been emerging in roughly the same period but are beginning to occupy the same territory. After describing the two paradigms and explaining their origin and operation, he puts forward a prediction for what their convergence may portend for the future of civil rights thought.
The Material Support Prosecution and Foreign Policy

INTRODUCTION 543 I. THE PRE-9/11 TERRORISM PROSECUTION—EXAMPLES AND TRENDS 546 A. UNITED STATES V. YUNIS 546 B. UNITED STATES V. REZAQ 550 C. INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM IN THE UNITED STATES—THE RAHMAN CASE .... 552 II. POST-9/11 PROSECUTIONS—§ 2339B AND THE GREATER POLITICALCONTEXT ...... 556 A. BACKGROUND TO § 2339B’S PASSAGE 556 B. THE DESIGNATION PROCESS AND THE ENSUING LEGAL DEBATE 558 III. SUSTAINING A CONVICTION—PERSONAL GUILT STANDARDS 577 A. “KNOWINGLY” MENS REA STANDARD—HUMANITARIAN LAW PROJECT ..... 577 B. SPECIFIC INTENT MENS REA—UNITED STATES V. AL-ARIAN 578 C. AL-ARIAN’S RULINGS REJECTED 581 D. THE LIMITS OF “MONEY IS FUNGIBLE” 582 CONCLUSION 593
Saving Charitable Settlements

This Article defies the conventional wisdom that all charitable distributions from a class action settlement fund are types of cy pres. Instead, it proposes a radical delineation between “cy pres remainders” (meaning settlement funds left over after individual monetary distributions) and “charitable settlements” (meaning money initially distributed to charities as part of class action settlements). While both have cy pres roots, these two settlement structures have been conflated, jeopardizing the potential utility of charitable settlements. After articulating more precise nomenclature for these distinct distribution methods, this Article justifies why we must preserve charitable settlements. This defense is particularly timely, as charitable settlements face growing attacks spurred by Chief Justice Roberts’ comments in the 2014 Marek v. Lane appeal. Once unchained from the strictures of the cy pres doctrine, charitable settlements become a tool to promote the larger regulatory objectives underlying class action procedures, including access to justice and deterrence.
Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall

Life in rural areas of developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk, such as illness or mortality of household members, crop or other income loss due to natural phenomena (weather, insect infestations, or fire, for example), and civil conflict. In addition to their contemporaneous effects, the effects of certain types of shocks may still be felt many years or even decades later. From a public policy standpoint, it is particularly important to identify shocks that have large long-run effects. Moreover, the mechanics underlying the persistence of shocks may be of con siderable interest. For example, a health shock may have a long-run effect simply because the health shock itself persists over time. Alternately, the health shock may not directly affect long run outcomes, but it could affect some other outcome?such as educational attainment?that helps determine long-run well-being. In this paper, we focus on shocks that occur at the very beginning of life. We ask how sensi tive long-run individual well-being is to environmental conditions around the time of birth. In particular, we examine the effect of weather shocks around the time of birth on the adult health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian women and men born between 1953 and 1974. In addition, we attempt to shed light on the intervening pathways connecting early-life rainfall to adult outcomes, illuminating the roles of health and educational attainment in deter mining adult socioeconomic status. This investigation has considerable data requirements. It necessitates information on weather shocks experienced by individuals several decades earlier, as well as detailed current informa tion on adult outcomes. We use information in the Indonesian Family Life Surveys (IFLS) on an individual's year and location of birth, and link each individual in that survey to locality specific rainfall data for their birth year. For individuals born in rural areas (on whom we focus), rainfall variation across space and time should generate corresponding variation in agricultural output and thus household income. To deal with measurement error in the rainfall data, we run instrumental variables regressions where variables for rainfall measured at slightly more distant rainfall stations serve as instruments for rainfall in the individual's birthplace and birth year. We examine the impact of early-life rainfall on a range of adult outcomes observed in 2000. We find that higher early-life rainfall leads to improved health, schooling, and socioeconomic status for women. Women with 20 percent higher rainfall (relative to normal local rainfall) in their year and location of birth are 3.8 percentage points less likely to self-report poor or very poor health. They attain 0.57 centimeters greater height, attain 0.22 more completed grades of
Adequacy of agency theory in explaining the venture capitalist-entrepreneur relationship: a firm life-cycle perspective

This paper explores the adequacy of agency theory in explaining the venture capitalist (VC)-entrepreneur relationship through a firm life-cycle perspective. The findings indicate that advanced stage relationships suffer severely from agency risks while early stage relationships are less affected. The findings have important theoretical implications, as they propose boundary conditions along which agency theory can be applied to the VC-entrepreneur relationship. VCs and entrepreneurs can utilise the recommendations for better decision making, leading to an improved working relationship.
A STRUCTURAL MODEL OF GOVERNMENT FORMATION

In this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies. We use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government formation process, the type of coalitions that form, and their relative stability.
Human capital investment, new firm creation and venture capital ☆

Abstract This paper studies the relation between firm investment in general human capital, new firm creation and financial development for new firm financing, such as the existence of a venture capital industry. On one hand, firm investment in general human capital leads employees to generate new innovative ideas for starting their own firm. Since employees need a venture capitalist to start their new firm, firm investment in general human capital encourages the creation of venture capitalists by increasing the need for their services, such as providing advice and monitoring. On the other hand, as new firm financing becomes available, firms’ willingness to invest in general human capital increases, and as a by-product, the creation of employee-founded and venture capital-backed new firms increases in the economy. Hence, our model provides a rational explanation for the emergence of new firms created by employees of established firms, which represents one of the most common type of new firms in many industries.
On the optimality of sliced inverse regression in high dimensions

The central subspace of a pair of random variables $(y,\boldsymbol{x})\in \mathbb{R}^{p+1}$ is the minimal subspace $\mathcal{S}$ such that $y\perp\!\!\!\!\!\perp \boldsymbol{x}|P_{\mathcal{S}}\boldsymbol{x}$. In this paper, we consider the minimax rate of estimating the central space under the multiple index model $y=f(\boldsymbol{\beta }_{1}^{\tau }\boldsymbol{x},\boldsymbol{\beta }_{2}^{\tau }\boldsymbol{x},\ldots,\boldsymbol{\beta }_{d}^{\tau }\boldsymbol{x},\epsilon )$ with at most $s$ active predictors, where $\boldsymbol{x}\sim N(0,\boldsymbol{\Sigma })$ for some class of $\boldsymbol{\Sigma }$. We first introduce a large class of models depending on the smallest nonzero eigenvalue $\lambda $ of $\operatorname{var}(\mathbb{E}[\boldsymbol{x}|y])$, over which we show that an aggregated estimator based on the SIR procedure converges at rate $d\wedge ((sd+s\log (ep/s))/(n\lambda ))$. We then show that this rate is optimal in two scenarios, the single index models and the multiple index models with fixed central dimension $d$ and fixed $\lambda $. By assuming a technical conjecture, we can show that this rate is also optimal for multiple index models with bounded dimension of the central space.
Average-case Acceleration for Bilinear Games and Normal Matrices

Advances in generative modeling and adversarial learning have given rise to renewed interest in smooth games. However, the absence of symmetry in the matrix of second derivatives poses challenges that are not present in the classical minimization framework. While a rich theory of average-case analysis has been developed for minimization problems, little is known in the context of smooth games. In this work we take a first step towards closing this gap by developing average-case optimal first-order methods for a subset of smooth games. We make the following three main contributions. First, we show that for zero-sum bilinear games the average-case optimal method is the optimal method for the minimization of the Hamiltonian. Second, we provide an explicit expression for the optimal method corresponding to normal matrices, potentially non-symmetric. Finally, we specialize it to matrices with eigenvalues located in a disk and show a provable speed-up compared to worst-case optimal algorithms. We illustrate our findings through benchmarks with a varying degree of mismatch with our assumptions.
Stability of Clusters in the Second-Order Kuramoto Model on Random Graphs

The Kuramoto model of coupled phase oscillators with inertia on Erdős–Renyi graphs is analyzed in this work. For a system with intrinsic frequencies sampled from a bimodal distribution we identify a variety of two cluster patterns and study their stability. To this end, we decompose the description of the cluster dynamics into two systems: one governing the (macro) dynamics of the centers of mass of the two clusters and the second governing the (micro) dynamics of individual oscillators inside each cluster. The former is a low-dimensional ODE whereas the latter is a system of two coupled Vlasov PDEs. Stability of the cluster dynamics depends on the stability of the low-dimensional group motion and on coherence of the oscillators in each group. We show that the loss of coherence in one of the clusters leads to the loss of stability of a two-cluster state and to formation of chimera states. The analysis of this paper can be generalized to cover states with more than two clusters and to coupled systems on W-random graphs. Our results apply to a model of a power grid with fluctuating sources.
Small Covers for Near-Zero Sets of Polynomials and Learning Latent Variable Models

Let $V$ be any vector space of multivariate degree- $d$ homogeneous polynomials with co-dimension at most $k$ , and $S$ be the set of points where all polynomials in $V$ nearly vanish. We establish a qualitatively optimal upper bound on the size of $\epsilon$ -covers for $S$ , in the $\ell_{2}$ -norm. Roughly speaking, we show that there exists an $\epsilon$ -cover for $S$ of cardinality $M=(k/\epsilon)^{O_{d}(k^{1/d})}$ . Our result is constructive yielding an algorithm to compute such an $\epsilon$ -cover that runs in time $\text{poly}(M)$ . Building on our structural result, we obtain significantly improved learning algorithms for several fundamental high-dimensional probabilistic models with hidden variables. These include density and parameter estimation for $k$ -mixtures of spherical Gaussians (with known common covariance), PAC learning one-hidden-layer ReLU networks with $k$ hidden units (under the Gaussian distribution), density and parameter estimation for $k$ -mixtures of linear regressions (with Gaussian covariates), and parameter estimation for $k$ -mixtures of hyperplanes. Our algorithms run in time quasi-polynomial in the parameter $k$ . Previous algorithms for these problems had running times exponential in $k^{\Omega(1)}$ . At a high-level our algorithms for all these learning problems work as follows: By computing the low-degree moments of the hidden parameters, we are able to find a vector space of polynomials that nearly vanish on the unknown parameters. Our structural result allows us to compute a quasi-polynomial sized cover for the set of hidden parameters, which we exploit in our learning algorithms.
MultiShifter: Software to generate structural models of extended two-dimensional defects in 3D and 2D crystals

Abstract Extended defects in crystals, such as dislocations, stacking faults and grain boundaries, play a crucial role in determining a wide variety of materials properties. Extended defects can also lead to novel electronic properties in two-dimensional materials, as demonstrated by recent discoveries of emergent electronic phenomena in twisted graphene bilayers. This paper describes several approaches to construct crystallographic models of two-dimensional extended defects in crystals for first-principles electronic structure calculations, including (i) crystallographic models to parameterize generalized cohesive zone models for fracture studies and meso-scale models of dislocations and (ii) crystallographic models of twisted bilayers. The approaches are implemented in an open source software package called M ulti S hifter .
A low power flexible dielectric barrier discharge disinfects surfaces and improves the action of hydrogen peroxide.

There is an urgent need for disinfection and sterilization devices accessible to the public that can be fulfilled by innovative strategies for using cold atmospheric pressure plasmas. Here, we demonstrate a successful novel combination of a flexible printed circuit design of a dielectric barrier discharge (flex-DBD) with an environmentally safe chemical reagent for surface decontamination from bacterial contaminants. Flex-DBD operates in ambient air, atmospheric pressure, and room temperature without any additional gas flow at a power density not exceeding 0.5 W/cm2. The flex-DBD activation of a 3% hydrogen peroxide solution results in the reduction in the bacterial load of a surface contaminant of > 6log10 in 90 s, about 3log10 and 2log10 better than hydrogen peroxide alone or the flex-DBD alone, respectively, for the same treatment time. We propose that the synergy between plasma and hydrogen peroxide is based on the combined action of plasma-generated OH· radicals in the hydrogen peroxide solution and the reactive nitrogen species supplied by the plasma effluent. A scavenger method verified a significant increase in OH· concentration due to plasma treatment. Novel in-situ FTIR absorption spectra show the presence of O3, NO2, N2O, and other nitrogen species. Ozone dissolving in the H2O2 solution can effectively generate OH· through a peroxone process. The addition of the reactive nitrogen species increases the disinfection efficiency of the hydroxyl radicals and other oxygen species. Hence, plasma activation of a low concentration hydrogen peroxide solution, using a hand-held flexible DBD device results in a dramatic improvement in disinfection.