cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Neural Stochastic Contraction Metrics for Learning-Based Control and Estimation

We present Neural Stochastic Contraction Metrics (NSCM), a new design framework for provably-stable learning-based control and estimation for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems. It uses a spectrally-normalized deep neural network to construct a contraction metric and its differential Lyapunov function, sampled via simplified convex optimization in the stochastic setting. Spectral normalization constrains the state-derivatives of the metric to be Lipschitz continuous, thereby ensuring exponential boundedness of the mean squared distance of system trajectories under stochastic disturbances. The trained NSCM model allows autonomous systems to approximate optimal stable control and estimation policies in real-time, and outperforms existing nonlinear control and estimation techniques including the state-dependent Riccati equation, iterative LQR, EKF, and the deterministic NCM, as shown in simulation results.
Debt, managerial compensation and learning

Abstract Using a dynamic model with uncertainty and asymmetric information, we study the impact of debt and bankruptcy on managerial compensation and learning. In this model, compensation has two roles to play—providing incentives to the manager and learning about his type. We show that debt, through bankruptcy, acts as a substitute of compensation in both dimensions and derive conditions under which debt lowers average compensation, pay–performance sensitivity and increases learning. We also examine the choice of debt and show that firm value can be increased due to debt's effect on managerial compensation, abstracting from other costs and benefits of debt. Finally, we conduct comparative statics with respect to the underlying parameters.
SOME PROPERTIES OF FLOWS AT FREEWAY BOTTLENECKS

The capacity of a freeway segment should be measured only when it is an active bottleneck. The properties of flows at active freeway bottlenecks have a bearing on both the definition of capacity and the procedure of capacity analysis. Past studies have examined the flow features at bottlenecks on several freeways in Toronto, Canada, and San Diego, California. This study examined 27 active bottlenecks in the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota for a 7-week period. The analysis focuses on the properties of prequeue transition flows (PQFs) and queue discharge flows (QDFs) averaged across various time intervals (30-s, daily average, and long-run average). It is found that the proportion by which flows drop after upstream queues form at all studied bottlenecks ranges from 2% to 11%. The 30-s QDFs display high variation and should not be assumed to be constant. The daily average QDFs at each studied bottleneck follow a normal distribution based on two normality tests and visual inspection of the normal probabil...
Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production

Though fundamental to innovation and essential to many industries and occupations, individual creativity has received limited attention as an economic behavior and has historically proven difficult to study. This paper studies the incentive effects of competition on individuals' creative production. Using a sample of commercial logo design competitions, and a novel, content-based measure of originality, I find that intensifying competition induces agents to produce original, untested ideas over tweaking their earlier work, but heavy competition drives them to stop investing altogether. The results yield lessons for the management of creative workers and for the implementation of competitive procurement mechanisms for innovation.
Copyright and Public Good Economics: A Misunderstood Relation

Author(s): Yoo, Christopher | Abstract: The conventional approach to analyzing the economics of copyright is based on the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are nonexcludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies of them is essentially zero. These assumptions in turn imply that markets systematically produce too few copyrightable works and underutilize those that are produced. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo argues that the conventional approach is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. A close examination of the foundational literature on public good economics reveals that the defining characteristic of public goods is the need to satisfy an optimality criterion known as the “Samuelson condition,” which suggests that the systematic bias toward underproduction is the result of the inability to induce consumers to reveal their preferences rather than nonexcludability and zero marginal cost. Reframing the analysis in terms of the Samuelson condition also expands the number of ways in which the assumptions underlying pure public goods can be relaxed. In so doing, it suggests that markets for copyrighted works are more properly analyzed as impure public goods. Unlike markets for pure public goods, markets for impure public goods exhibit no systematic bias toward underproduction and are not bounded away from providing efficient levels of utilization. The insights of impure public goods theory thus have broad implications for a wide range of copyright-related issues, including fair use, duration, compulsory licenses, database protection, digital rights management, and derivative works.
An Empirical Investigation of Liquidation Choices of Failed High-Tech Firms

I. COLLECTING THE DATA 4 II. ANALYZING THE DATA 11 A. Summary Data 11 B. Intellectual Property and Bankruptcy 14 C. Location and Bankruptcy 15 1. The Basic Hypothesis: Location and Bankruptcy 15 a. Formulating the Basic Hypothesis 15 b. Testing the Basic Hypothesis 21 2. Refining the Hypothesis 24 a. Trying to Separate Law and Culture 24 b. Location and Type of Bankruptcy Filing 37 c. Size and Bankruptcy Filing 44 III. IMPLICATIONS 45 A. Alternatives to Bankruptcy 45 1. Nonconsenting Creditors 45 2. Secrecy 50 B. The Role of Bankruptcy 53 1. Summary Data 54 2. Why File for Bankruptcy? 59 a. Optimal Stopping 59 b. Reorganizing 61 c. Enforcing Pro Rata Treatment 63 d. Resolving Complex Litigation 65 e. Industry Effects 66
Managing Buried Treasure Across Frontiers: The International Law of Transboundary Aquifers

In recent years, transboundary aquifers have received growing attention in numerous policy-making and negotiating circles. This development suggests an evolution in customary international law for transboundary aquifers. This article examines recent international arrangements and pronouncements related to the assessment, use, allocation and protection of transboundary groundwater resources and identifies the legal trends emerging from these instruments. The article also considers gaps and shortcomings in the emerging regulatory regime and offers recommendations for the further development of the law.
Health information exchange, system size and information silos

There are many technology platforms that bring benefits only when users share data. In healthcare, this is a key policy issue, because of the potential cost savings and quality improvements from 'big data' in the form of sharing electronic patient data across medical providers. Indeed, one criterion used for federal subsidies for healthcare information technology is whether the software has the capability to share data. We find empirically that larger hospital systems are more likely to exchange electronic patient information internally, but are less likely to exchange patient information externally with other hospitals. This pattern is driven by instances where there may be a commercial cost to sharing data with other hospitals. Our results suggest that the common strategy of using 'marquee' large users to kick-start a platform technology has an important drawback of potentially creating information silos. This suggests that federal subsidies for health data technologies based on 'meaningful use' criteria, that are based simply on the capability to share data rather than actual sharing of data, may be misplaced.
Religion and the Restatements

As Western democracies go, we are an unusually religious people. A recent Gallup International study on comparative religiosity found that 60% of Americans described themselves as “religious,” while the percentages were generally much lower in Canada, Australia, and Western Europe.1 Conversely, only five percent of Americans identified themselves as “atheists,” which places the United States among the world’s least atheistic nations, and on a par with Saudi Arabia.2 The underlying causes of our national religiosity are undoubtedly complex—and they are decidedly not the subjects of this paper—but it seems likely that our distinctive legal traditions surrounding religious freedom have played a significant role in shaping our cultural norms.3 France and Turkey, perhaps our most notable peers in the formal separation of church and state, rank well below the United States in religiosity at 37% and 23% respectively.4 This may be a result of French and Turkish legal traditions that are openly suspicious— perhaps even hostile—toward organized religion, and which have in large part sought to insulate the state from undue clerical influence.5 In stark contrast, an important strain of the American
Investigating the Dimensionality of Counterproductive Work Behavior

The study investigated the dimensionality of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) by examining the relationships between various counterproductive behaviors. Utilizing a university alumni sample (N = 343), data was collected through both self–report and direct judgments of the likelihood of co–occurrence. Eleven categories of CWB were examined: (1) Theft and Related Behavior; (2) Destruction of Property; (3) Misuse of Information; (4) Misuse of Time and Resources; (5) Unsafe Behavior; (6) Poor Attendance; (7) Poor Quality Work; (8) Alcohol Use; (9) Drug Use; (10) Inappropriate Verbal Actions; and (11) Inappropriate Physical Actions. CWB items and categories were generally positively related. Multidimensional scaling analysis suggests that the CWB categories vary on two dimensions: an Interpersonal–Organizational dimension and a Task Relevance dimension.
Population, Technology, and Growth: From Malthusian Stagnation to the Demographic Transition and Beyond

This paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population,technology,and output. It encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development. The economy evolves from aMalthusianregime,wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita,intoaPost-Malthusianregime,wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth. Ultimately, a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth,andtheeconomyentersaModernGrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth
Racial and ethnic disparities in the use of drug therapy

The purpose of this research is to explain the variation in the utilization of drug therapy for the medical conditions of depression, high cholesterol, and hypertension between Hispanics, non-Hispanic blacks, and non-Hispanics whites using Oaxaca-type decomposition analysis based on logit estimates. We find that almost the entire share of the utilization differences in drug therapy between blacks and whites can be explained by the differences in the coefficients of observable characteristics, while the sources of the utilization difference between the whites and Hispanics are split between the differences in the observable characteristics and the coefficient estimates. This result implies that strategies to improve racial and ethnic disparities need to be tailored to each group by focusing on the specific factors that are attributed to causing the disparity.
The Effect of Education on Time Preferences

Abstract I examine whether education increases patience by analyzing a case study of a public college in Mexico City where admission decisions are determined through a lottery. Applicants who were successful in the draw were more likely to be studying in the following years. I surveyed the applicants to this college almost two years after the admission decision was made and measured their time preferences with a series of hypothetical inter-temporal choice questions. I find that individuals who acquired more education due to the admission lottery were, on average, more patient, which suggests there may be a causal effect of education on time preferences.
The impact of supervening illegality on international contracts in a comparative context

This article is a comparative study on the issue of frustration of contracts with a closer look at supervening illegality of international contracts as a frustrating event. The first part of this research mainly discusses how different legal regimes deal with this issue. When a frustrating event occurs, some legal systems apply pacta sunt servanda with very little flexibility in terminating (the only caveat being cases of force majeure, physical and legal impossibility), or at least adapting, the contract based on new circumstances. Some other legal regimes rule for obligor's relief and subsequent termination of the contract. There are also moderate legal systems that do stand somewhere between these extremes, which frequently adapt the contract to what the parties had intended when concluding the contract. The latter seems to be more appropriate and suitable. The first part of the article will deal with frustration, while the latter part will focus on the prerequisites and consequences of supervening illegality. A subsequent change in the law, no self-induced non-performance and unforeseeability are the prerequisites in all legal systems. The major consequence is absolute and total discharge of the contract for permanent illegality, while for temporary illegality performance shall merely be suspended.
DNN: A Two-Scale Distributional Tale of Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Inference

Heterogeneous treatment effects are the center of gravity in many modern causal inference applications. In this paper, we investigate the estimation and inference of heterogeneous treatment effects with precision in a general non-parametric setting. To this end, we enhance the classical $k$-nearest neighbor method with a simple algorithm, extend it to a distributional setting, and suggest the two-scale distributional nearest neighbors (DNN) estimator with reduced finite-sample bias. Our recipe is first to subsample the data and average the 1-nearest neighbor estimators from each subsample. With appropriately chosen subsampling scale, the resulting DNN estimator is proved to be asymptotically unbiased and normal under mild regularity conditions. We then proceed with combining DNN estimators with different subsampling scales to further reduce bias. Our theoretical results on the advantages of the new two-scale DNN framework are well supported by several Monte Carlo simulations. The newly suggested method is also applied to a real-life data set to study the heterogeneity of treatment effects of smoking on children's birth weights across mothers' ages.
Ideas of the Marketplace: A Guide to The 1996 Telecommunications Act

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 represented an enormous experimental step towards deregulating the telecommunications marketplace while opening it up to competition. With an eye towards breaking up the telecommunications monopolies held by local telephone service providers, the Act created regulations that forced local carriers to share their market and their resources with other telecommunications providers. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 itself is extremely complex. This article is a "guided tour" through the major provisions of the Act. The first step in understanding the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is to understand how the telecommunications industry operates. Part two of this article explains the telecommunications landscape for telephone companies, from the role of Local Exchange Carriers to Bell Operating Companies. Part two of this article also explains how the Act affects the players in the telecommunications world and encourages competition in their spheres of influence. Finally, part two of this article explains the incentives that the Act gives to local monopolies to conform to regulations and the standards that local carriers must meet in order to qualify for these incentives. Part three of this article explains how the Act impacts upon cable television and video programming. This section enumerates the various deregulation efforts in the cable industry, including rate deregulation, loosening of cable ownership rules, and the elimination of the ban on cable-telephone cross ownership and cable companies providing local telephone service. It also explains which regulations remain, including the ban on mergers between cable operators and local telephone companies.Part four of the article addresses how broadcasters are affected by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This includes eased restrictions on broadcasters in terms of licensing and multiple ownerships of single broadcast licensesPart five of the article deals with the Act's potentially controversial treatment of explicit materials on television through the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Some available means of monitoring content carry potential Constitutional violations. Others simply run the risk of being ineffective. This section posits creative solutions involving non-government actors making use of the Act's "Good Samaritan" provision and explains the limitations of the Good Samaritan provision.
Afterlife incentives in charitable giving

There is an expanding literature that examines the influence of religion on economic behaviour. Researchers typically do not distinguish among religions, masking important variation across doctrines. Our article adopts a typology of religions based on the construct of salvific merit. Major religious doctrines are ordered based on their linkage between charitable behaviour in this life and condition in the afterlife. Using the Center on Philanthropy Panel Study (COPPS), we exploit variation in household marginal tax rates (a subsidy to charitable giving) to test the influence of major religious doctrines on charitable giving. We find that charitable giving by adherents to high-salvific-merit religions are less sensitive to changes in charitable subsidies. Adherents to low-salvific-merit religions behave more like nonreligious households. Our results suggest that religious households optimize according to specific doctrines rather than a broad notion of religion.
The Role of Auditing in Investor Protection

Protection of outside investors depends on the detection and punishment of resource diversion by corporate insiders, including managers and controlling shareholders. We focus on the role played in investor protection by self‐interested auditors operating in a competitive audit market. In our setting, auditors represent the mechanism whereby detection of diversion occurs. We show that markets with relatively greater auditor penalties for audit failures and greater insider penalties for detected resource diversion have larger total investment levels, a higher proportion of the firm held by outsiders, higher audit resource investment, higher audit fees, and higher expected investment returns.
THE DECLINE AND RISE OF INTERSTATE MIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES: EVIDENCE FROM THE IPUMS, 1850–1990

We document long-run trends in interstate migration rates, using individual-level data from the U.S. Census for the period 1850–1990. Two measures of migration are calculated. The first considers an individual to have moved if she is residing in a state different from her state of birth. The second considers a family to have moved if it is residing in a state different from the state of birth of one of its young children, allowing us to estimate the timing of moves more precisely. Overall migration propensities have followed a U-shaped trend since 1850, falling until around 1900 and then rising until around 1970. We examine variation in the propensity to make an interstate move by age, sex, race, nativity, region of origin, family structure, and education. Counterfactuals based on probit estimates of the propensity to migrate suggest that the rise in migration of families since 1900 could be explained by increased educational attainment, although education may be serving as a proxy for unmeasured covariates. The decline of interstate migration in the late nineteenth century remains to be explained.
Deadlines in Product Development

Deadlines are common in product development and are often felt to be too harsh—many development efforts are still worth continuing at the time of mandated termination. We examine the value of deadlines from the agency-theoretic perspective. We consider a firm that pays an agent to lead product development activities. The chance of success depends on the viability of the project and the effort of the agent. As the project proceeds without success, doubts grow as to whether the project is viable. To motivate continued effort, the firm must promise the agent a generous reward if success is achieved during the late stage of development. However, rewarding late success undermines effort incentives in the early stage. The firm may find it more profitable to impose a hard, early deadline to eliminate the agent’s dynamic incentive to procrastinate. We derive conditions under which the firm should impose such deadlines. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
Finding What Was Lost: Sorting Out the Custodian’s Privilege against Self-Incrimination from the Compelled Production of Records

This Article considers the tension between the privilege against self-incrimination and the government's authority to require a custodian to furnish documents and testify about them when those statements will be used by the prosecution to seek the admission of the records at trial. While the language of the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from forcing a defendant to testify at his criminal trial, the rationale adopted by courts for requiring a custodian of records to provide information about documents undermines the protection afforded the witness at trial. This diminished constitutional protection is a result of confusion arising from the Supreme Court's opinions on the availability of the privilege to witnesses responding to subpoenas for documents, opinions which did not consider the continuing availability of the Fifth Amendment at the trial stage, regardless of whether a person could invoke the privilege during the investigative stage.
The impact of return nonnormality on exchange options

The Margrabe formula is used extensively by theorists and practitioners not only on exchange options, but also on executive compensation schemes, real options, weather and commodity derivatives, etc. However, the crucial assumption of a bivariate normal distribution is not fully satisfied in almost all applications. The impact of nonnormality on exchange options is studied by using a bivariate Gram-Charlier approximation. For near-the-money exchange options, skewness and coskewness induce price corrections which are linear in moneyness, while kurtosis and cokurtosis induce quadratic price corrections. The nonnormality helps to explain the implied correlation smile observed in practice.
Regulatory innovation in the governance of human subjects research: A cautionary tale and some modest proposals

Under US regulations known as the “Common Rule,” federally-supported human-subject research must be reviewed by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). The Common Rule system from a distance looks like an innovative instantiation of prescriptions for constitutive regulation and soft law, but in practice has grown into a self-referential, unresponsive, and legalistic bureaucracy. This article reviews criticism of the Common Rule. It also discusses why the system fails to regulate in an efficient and effective way, pointing in particular to the poor fit between the IRB and its assigned tasks. Turning to reforms, the article uses the heuristic of “regulatory space” to describe the range of actual and potential regulators with the capacity to set standards, monitor compliance, and discipline violators. Regulatory reform is framed by three conceptual changes: recognizing the limitations of the IRB as an oversight body; narrowing the range of risks the system is tasked to control; and disentangling the conflicting regulatory logics of behavioral standard-setting and virtue promotion. The article concludes with a roster of possible changes that would make the IRB a more responsive regulator, enroll a wider range of actors in the promotion of virtue, focus resources on more serious risks, and address the structural causes of researcher misconduct.
Modern Arbitration Values and the First World War

This Article provides an overview of the arbitration reform movement and examines several ways how World War I influenced this movement and the enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”). It also discusses how WWI’s influence may inform our current understanding of the FAA and recent attempts to amend the FAA. Examining the FAA through the lens of the First World War sheds some light on the public dimension of arbitration. The war helps provide historical support for the public dimension value, and through this examination, one sees how this value has evolved over time. This historical perspective also suggests how the public dimension value should be reflected within the broader framework of arbitration law.
Rights, Capabilities, and the Good Society

In Part I this essay explores and then criticizes the two major arguments behind the conventional wisdom that rights undermine efforts to secure a state role in ensuring the material preconditions for a good society, and therefore, the material preconditions for the development of those human capabilities essential to a fully human life. I conclude in this part that this understanding of rights is mistaken. In Part II, I urge that the pragmatic argument put forward by rights critics and some welfare advocates for forgoing rights-talk and rights-rhetoric also fails: there are very real costs, both in theory and in law, in deciding to forgo putting the case for the state's obligation to provide minimal material goods in terms of rights. In Part III, I briefly describe two core rights that a refashioned liberal state, understood as a vehicle for protecting not just the liberty but also the capabilities of citizens, should recognize: first, a right to be protected against private violence, and second, a right of caregivers to give care to dependents without incurring the risk of severe impoverishment or subordination – a right, to use the provocative phrase coined by the philosopher Eva Kittay, to doulia. Both rights, I think, are directly entailed by the state's obligation to provide the minimal preconditions for the development of those fundamental human capabilities that are themselves essential to a fully human life. Both rights however, could be and should be conceived in the most traditionally liberal terms. The first such right – the right to protection against private violence – although now disfavored in United States rights discourse, seems fully authorized by both the liberal tradition and the American Constitution itself. The second right for which I will argue – the right to provide care to dependents has no similar basis of support in either liberal theory or American constitutionalism. It is not incompatible with either, however, and is at least arguably required by the deepest commitments of both. The right to protection and the right to care are rights that can be framed in liberal terms, and both rights would go a long way toward securing for individual citizens the minimal preconditions of a good society.
Sex and the ballot box: perception of ballot measures regarding same-sex marriage and abortion in California

Voters in many American states have considered important social policies that redefine civil liberties within their state through the initiative and referendum. An important question remaining is, are voters knowledgeable enough to make decisions on these social policies that have far-reaching effects? The common wisdom is that voters rely on information shortcuts in lieu of extensive knowledge about the issues. Unlike candidate elections, however, ballot measures lack some prominent and useful information shortcuts (i.e. party identification). We test the hypothesis that voters use shortcuts to inform their decisions on two ballot measures central to today's policy debates: California's Proposition 4 on parental notification for abortion and Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage. We show that voters do not use cues universally, and, furthermore, factual information has a limited effect on voters’ decisions. In particular, we find that the persuasiveness of an endorsement is conditional on whether an individual trusts the source.
Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat

Intuitively, people should cheat more when cheating is more lucrative, but we find that the effect of performance-based pay-rates on dishonesty depends on how readily people can compare their pay-rate to that of others. In Experiment 1, participants were paid 5 cents or 25 cents per self-reported point in a trivia task, and half were aware that they could have received the alternative pay-rate. Lower pay-rates increased cheating when the prospect of a higher pay-rate was salient. Experiment 2 illustrates that this effect is driven by the ease with which poorly compensated participants can compare their pay to that of others who earn a higher pay-rate. Our results suggest that low pay-rates are, in and of themselves, unlikely to promote dishonesty. Instead, it is the salience of upward social comparisons that encourages the poorly compensated to cheat.
Does Foreign Direct Investment Increase the Productivity of Domestic Firms? In Search of Spillovers Through Backward Linkages

Many countries compete against one another in attracting foreign investors by offering ever more generous incentive packages and justifying their actions with the productivity gains that are expected to accrue to domestic producers from knowledge externalities generated by foreign affiliates. Despite this being hugely important to public policy choices, there is little conclusive evidence indicating that domestic firms benefit from foreign presence in their sector. It is possible, though, that researchers have been looking for foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers in the wrong place. Multinationals have an incentive to prevent information leakage that would enhance the performance of their local competitors in the same industry but at the same time may want to transfer knowledge to their local suppliers in other sectors. Spillovers from FDI may be, therefore, more likely to take place through backward linkages-that is, contacts between domestic suppliers of intermediate inputs and their multinational clients-and thus would not have been captured by the earlier literature. This paper focuses on the understudied issue of FDI spillovers through backward linkages and goes beyond existing studies by shedding some light on factors driving this phenomenon. It also improves over existing literature by addressing several econometric problems that may have biased the results of earlier research. Based on a firm-level panel data set from Lithuania, the estimation results are consistent with the existence of productivity spillovers. They suggest that a 10 percent increase in the foreign presence in downstream sectors is associated with 0.38 percent rise in output of each domestic firm in the supplying industry. The data indicate that these spillovers are not restricted geographically, since local firms seem to benefit from the operation of downstream foreign affiliates on their own, as well as in other regions. The results further show that greater productivity benefits are associated with domestic-market, rather than export-oriented, foreign affiliates. But no difference is detected between the effects of fully-owned foreign firms and those with joint domestic and foreign ownership. The findings of a positive correlation between productivity growth of domestic firms and the increase in multinational presence in downstream sectors should not, however, be interpreted as a call for subsidizing FDI. These results are consistent with the existence of knowledge spillovers from foreign affiliates to their local suppliers, but they may also be a result of increased competition in upstream sectors. While the former case would call for offering FDI incentive packages, it would not be the optimal policy in the latter. Certainly more research is needed to disentangle these two effects.
Conflicts of interest in sell-side research and the moderating role of institutional investors

Abstract Because sell-side analysts are dependent on institutional investors for performance ratings and trading commissions, we argue that analysts are less likely to succumb to investment banking or brokerage pressure in stocks highly visible to institutional investors. Examining a comprehensive sample of analyst recommendations over the 1994–2000 period, we find that analysts’ recommendations relative to consensus are positively associated with investment banking relationships and brokerage pressure but negatively associated with the presence of institutional investor owners. The presence of institutional investors is also associated with more accurate earnings forecasts and more timely re-ratings following severe share price falls.
Reforming the Civil Rights Act of 1871: The Problem of Police Perjury

... Police perjury is no joking matter, nor is it confined to New York City. ... An intervening 1983 Supreme Court decision, Briscoe v. LaHue, held that all witnesses who commit perjury at trial, including police officers, enjoy absolute immunity from civil liability under the CRA. ... Part III both examines the limited range of financial remedies presently available for the wrongfully convicted and suggests that, at least when police perjury constitutes a custom or practice, Briscoe should not bar 1983 liability for governmental entities that promote or tolerate such conduct. ... And in cases of wrongful convictions, any relief would be incomplete because Briscoe's absolute immunity doctrine for witnesses precludes proof that the defendant police officer committed perjury at the trial which produced the plaintiff's false conviction. ... In short, because a Monell claim does not hinge on establishing an individual officer's liability, a witness's absolute immunity defense under Briscoe should not defeat a Monell claim of municipal liability. ... Punitive damages are generally available in 1983 actions alleging individual liability, but in wrongful conviction cases, Briscoe renders this sanction wholly illusory, as the police officer who committed perjury at trial - often the most blameworthy individual - enjoys absolute immunity under the CRA. ...
Common Ownership of the Earth as a Non‐Parochial Standpoint: A Contingent Derivation of Human Rights

Human rights are rights that are invariant with respect to conventions, institutions, culture, or religion. One concern about such rights is the problem of parochialism, the question of whether human rights can plausibly be of global reach and thus justify actions even against societies in whose culture those rights are not supported. I seek to meet this challenge by revitalizing a standpoint common in the 17th century, but that has since attracted only occasional attention and has not played much of a role since the Rawlsian Renaissance of political philosophy. That standpoint is that humanity collectively owns the resources of the earth. Human rights can be seen as offering guarantees that the imposition of the global order (i.e., the system of states and the network of organizations that provides for "global governance") and its presence on commonly owned space, is acceptable to co-owners. Human rights thus derived would be non-parochial because the standpoint from which they are derived is (assuming we can spell out the relevant notion of ownership in sufficiently weak a manner to render it so, a notion that obviously must be much weaker than the bundle of rights secured by the civil law). Lest one thinks this approach to human rights is excessively capitalist, materialist, misses the spirit of the human rights movement, or too obviously mis-locates the concern behind human rights, notice that what is at stake is ownership of things that make human life possible. The main advantage of my account is that it provides a grounding of human rights in extremely plausible starting points.
Economic transition, gender bias, and the distribution of earnings in China

Market-oriented economic reform, which accelerated after 1992, has brought substantial changes to the Chinese economy. This dramatic economic transition was raised two important questions: ‘How are women faring in the transition from a planned economy to a market economy?’ and ‘Are some women faring relatively better than other women’? We use data from the Chinese Household Income Projects for the years 1988 and 1995, a standard earnings equation, and quantile regressions to estimate and decompose the earnings gap. Our findings suggest that while the earnings gap has increased, the fraction of the gap ‘unexplained’ by differences in human capital variables such as education and experience has declined over time. This result is particularly pronounced for low earning women.
The Non-monotonic Effect of Board Independence on Credit Ratings

Using the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 as a natural experiment, we document a non-monotonic relation between board independence and credit ratings. Ratings are upgraded with an exogenous increase of board independence only when independence is low, which is consistent with the costs as well as benefits of having independent directors. Further analysis suggests that these costs may include the deficiency of the industrial expertise of independent directors, the cost of information acquisition for independent directors to become informed to monitor management, and the risk-taking incentive of these directors that may adversely affect the credit risk of a financially distressed firm.
Deporting Families: Legal Matter or Political Question?

Last year 245,424 noncitizens were removed from the United States, and courts played virtually no role in ensuring that these decisions did not violate individual substantive rights like freedom of speech, substantive due process, or retroactivity. Had these individuals been deported from a European country, domestic and regional courts would have reviewed the decisions to ensure compatibility with these types of rights. Numerous international law scholars and immigration scholars seek to minimize the gap between the legal processes offered in the United States and Europe for noncitizens challenging deportation orders. Many of these scholars contend that greater recognition of international human rights in U.S. courts would bring U.S. deportation jurisprudence closer to its European counterpart. While appealing, these arguments fail to recognize that the availability of rights is not what distinguishes the European deportation jurisprudence from the American deportation jurisprudence. European courts play a more active role in reviewing deportation decisions than U.S. courts because of institutional cultural norms regarding the State interests at stake in regulating immigration. European adjudicators conceptualize immigration regulation as a legal matter rather than as a political matter as U.S. adjudicators do. This distinction between "immigration regulation is political"
Oil and Water in the Indian Country

Congress first authorized general oil and gas leasing in Indian country in the 1920s. In the intervening decades, non-Indian oil and gas companies have conducted exploration, development, and production activities on Indian lands, with all the attendant environmental effects. In particular, water pollution - from oil spills, use of injection wells, and other activities - has been a serious and often devastating problem on Indian lands. This article explores environmental regulation of oil and gas development in Indian country, concentrating on the protection and regulation of water resources.
How to Catch a Tiger: Understanding Putting Performance on the PGA Tour

Existing performance metrics utilized by the PGA TOUR have biases towards specific styles of play, which make relative player comparisons challenging. Our goal is to evaluate golfers in a way that eliminates these biases and to better understand how the best players maintain their advantage. Through a working agreement with the PGA TOUR, we have obtained access to proprietary "ShotLink" data that pinpoints the location of every shot taken on the PGA TOUR. Using these data, we develop distance-based models for two components of putting performance: the probability of making the putt and the remaining distance to the pin conditioned on missing. The first is modeled through a logistic regression, while the second is modeled through a gamma regression. Both of these models fit the data well and provide interesting insights into the game. Additionally, by describing the act of putting using a simple Markov chain, we are able to combines these two models to characterize the putts-to-go for the field from any distance on the green for the PGA TOUR. The results of this Markov model match both the empirical expectation and variance of putts-to-go . We use our models to evaluate putting performance in terms of the strokes or putts gained per round relative to the field. Using this metric, we can determine what portion of a player's overall performance is due to advantage (or loss) gained through putting, and conversely what portion of the player's performance is derived off the green. We demonstrate with examples how our metric eliminates significant biases that exist in the PGA TOUR's Putting Average statistic. Last, extending the concept of putts gained to evaluate player-specific performance, we show how our models can be used to quickly test situational hypotheses, such as differences between putting for par and birdie and performance under pressure.
Hedging stock sector risk with credit default swaps

Abstract This study examines the potential risk reducing benefits of credit default swaps (CDS) against risk in U.S. stock market sectors from 2004 to 2011. Tests of GARCH dynamic conditional correlation coefficients indicate that CDS serve as an effective hedge against risk in all stock sectors. CDS also provide a safe haven in times of extreme stock market volatility and during periods of financial crisis in a limited number of sectors.
Unraveling the conjunction paradox

The conjunction paradox arises when there are multiple elements to be proven and the likelihood of each element is at least partially independent of the likelihood of the others. A fact-finder might believe that each of several elements is more likely to be true than false, but also believe that each of these elements is only somewhat more likely than its negation. In that situation, probability theory may dictate that the conjunction of the elements is less probable than their disjunction, suggesting that there should be a finding of no liability. Nonetheless, the typical jury instructions given by American judges reject this result, and many scholars of proof have sought to construct normative theories that justify that rejection. Unfortunately, the problem of conjunctive likelihood cannot be dissolved through re-description of the task that fact-finders engage in; it is, instead, inherent in any system of multi-element proof. The problem does not go away just because a theorist chooses to model proof comparatively and without quantifying likelihoods, as jurors must still decide whether conjunctive explanations are equally, more or less convincing than disjunctive explanations, all other things being equal. Furthermore, those who have responded to the paradox by articulating alternative mathematical rules for handling conjunctive proof have failed to make a convincing case for the desirability of such approaches. Given present knowledge regarding the psychological dynamics of fact-finding and the risks of error at trial, the best resolution of the paradox is to reject the common law’s position and instruct juries that they should deny liability in all situations where the plaintiff has failed to demonstrate that the conjunction of all predicate elements is more likely than their disjunctive negation.
Capitalization of In‐Process Research and Development under SFAS 141R and Information Asymmetry

This study examines the effect of capitalizing acquired in-process research and development (IPR&D) on information asymmetry under the Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 141 (R). SFAS 141R requires acquirers to fully recognize IPR&D at fair value as an indefinite-lived intangible asset until completion or discontinuation of the project. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we find bid-ask spreads of IPR&D acquirers are higher in the post-SFAS 141R period, relative to non-IPR&D acquirers, suggesting increased information asymmetry of IPR&D acquirers under the new capitalization requirement. Alternative measures of information asymmetry provide consistent inferences. Additional analyses indicate earnings management through asset-classification shifting between IPR&D and goodwill is an explanation for the increase in information asymmetry. Overall, our evidence is consistent with IPR&D acquirers strategically using the additional reporting discretion afforded them under SFAS 141R in ways that degraded the information environment. As such, our evidence is relevant to the deliberations regarding whether capitalizing or expensing is the most appropriate method to account for R&D expenditures.
THE PROBLEM OF HEAVEN

An argument against the rationality of desiring to go to heaven might be put in the form of a trilemma: (1) any state of being that both lasts eternally and preserves me as the person I am would be hellish and therefore would not be a state of being that I could have any reason to desire; (2) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into a non-person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire; and (3) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into some other person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire. This paper offers defenses of each of the three horns of this trilemma and concludes that there is no rationally compelling reason for any human being to desire to go to heaven.
The Costs of BAPCPA: Report of the Pilot Study of Consumer Bankruptcy Cases

Substantial changes were made to the consumer bankruptcy system with the enactment of BAPCPA. These changes, however, were enacted without data support for, or recognition of how such changes would affect the cost of accessing the bankruptcy system. The Costs of BAPCPA Pilot Study undertook a review of the costs of the consumer bankruptcy system following BAPCPA's enactment, to determine if costs were increased, and if so, whether these costs were passed on to the consumer. The issue of "costs" distills the question of what attorneys are charging consumers to represent them under the new regime. Thus a study of the costs of the consumer provisions of BAPCPA is in essence, the study of consumer bankruptcy attorney fees. The study also sought and discovered the answer to the question of whether unsecured creditor distributions were impacted by BAPCPA.
Instruments of Political Control National Oil Companies, Oil Prices, and Petroleum Subsidies

Global petroleum subsidies peaked at US$520 billion in the summer of 2008 and reached US$212 billion in 2011, carrying high fiscal and environmental costs. Why do some countries spend so much money...