cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Tardiness bounds for fixed-priority global scheduling without intra-task precedence constraints

Fixed-priority multiprocessor schedulers are often preferable to dynamic-priority ones because they entail less overhead, are easier to implement, and enable certain tasks to be favored over others. Under global fixed-priority (G-FP) scheduling, as applied to the standard sporadic task model, response times for low-priority tasks may be unbounded, even if the total task system utilization is low. In this paper, it is shown that this negative result can be circumvented if different jobs of the same task are allowed to execute in parallel. In particular, a response-time bound is presented for task systems that allow intra-task parallelism. This bound merely requires that the total utilization does not exceed the overall processing capacity—individual task utilizations need not be further restricted. This result implies that G-FP is optimal for scheduling soft real-time tasks that require bounded tardiness, if intra-task parallelism is allowed.
Strip Clubs, “Secondary Effects” and Residential Property Prices

Municipalities regulate sexually oriented businesses (SOBs) through the “secondary effects” doctrine, which justifies limiting First Amendment speech protections inside SOBs. Negative effects of SOBs on nearby neighborhood quality are a frequently cited secondary effect. Little empirical evidence exists that SOBs generate such negative externalities. If SOBs generate negative externalities, then nearby property prices should decrease when a strip club opens. We estimate regression models of housing prices to determine the effect of new clubs on nearby residential property prices in Seattle, exploiting the termination of a 17‐year moratorium on openings and find no evidence that strip clubs have “secondary effects.”
The Effect of Endogenous Right-to-Work Laws on Business and Economic Conditions in the United States: A Multivariate Approach

A states right to prohibit unions from compelling employees to pay dues even when they are covered by a collective bargaining agreement has its basis in the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (1935). After the amendment's passage, twelve states passed right-to-work laws--as did ten more states in the intervening years. Although there has been considerable research on the effect of right-to-work laws on union density, organizing efforts, industrial development and some study of wage differences, there has been little or no examination of the legislations influence on business and economic conditions across states. In this paper, the average differences in business conditions, employment, personal income, wages and salaries, and proprietors income across states that have enacted right-to-work laws versus those states that did not, are examined assuming that the legislation is endogenous and controlling for state real economic growth, region, and year. Although right-to-work states may be more attractive to business, this does not necessarily translate into enhanced economic verve in the right-to-work state if there is little trickle-down from business owners to the non-unionized workers. While the number of self-employed is higher and business bankruptcies lower on average in right-to-work states, there is no significant difference in capital formation or employment rates, ceteris paribus. In addition, per-capita personal income and wages are both lower, yet proprietors income is higher in right-to-work states.
Law is not (best considered) an essentially contested concept

I argue that law is not best considered an essentially contested concept. After first explaining the notion of essential contestability and disaggregating law into several related concepts, I show that the most basic and general concept of law does not fit within the criteria offered for essential contestation. I buttress this claim with the explanation that essential contestation is itself a framework for understanding complex concepts and therefore should only be applied when it would yield a greater understanding of uses of the concept to which it is applied. I then show that, even if law meets some basic criteria of essential contestation, applying the appellation does not helpfully illuminate the most general concept of law and therefore it should not be used, while allowing that it might be more useful for the related concept of the rule of law.
Lender certification premiums

Abstract The announcement of a bank loan by a borrowing firm has been shown to have a positive effect on the market value of the borrower’s claims. This is consistent with a lender’s implied endorsement of the borrower––an endorsement that has value to the borrower. In this paper, we investigate whether the lender is able to extract a premium loan rate or certification premium in return. We find empirical evidence that in the absence of collateral reputable lenders are able to exact a certification premium.
Internal Audit Sourcing Arrangement and the External Auditor's Reliance Decision*

This paper examines the effects of internal audit sourcing arrangement on the external auditor’s reliance decision in the presence of different levels of inherent risk and task subjectivity. We posit that external auditors will rely more on outsourced than in-house internal audit functions (IAFs) and that this difference will be more pronounced when inherent risk is high or when the work performed by internal auditors relates to a subjective task. Participants in the study were 127 external auditors from a Big 4 firm who completed an experimental case in which we manipulated internal audit sourcing, inherent risk, and task subjectivity. Results from the experiment indicate an interaction between sourcing and inherent risk such that external auditors rely more on outsourced than in-house internal auditors when the level of inherent risk is high but do not differentiate based on sourcing arrangement when inherent risk is low. While we find that reliance is lower for subjective than for objective tasks, we do not find an interaction between sourcing arrangement and the subjectivity of the work performed. We do find a marginally significant interaction between inherent risk and subjectivity of work performed: external auditors are less willing to rely on subjective work performed by internal auditors when inherent risk is high but do not differentiate based on task subjectivity when inherent risk is low. Additional analyses indicate that sourcing arrangement affects the reliance decision both directly and indirectly. The indirect effect appears to be mediated through external auditors’ perceptions of internal auditor objectivity.
The California Greenhouse Gas Waiver Decision and Agency Interpretation: A Response to Professors Galle and Seidenfeld

Professors Brian Galle and Mark Seidenfeld add some important strands to the debate on agency preemption, particularly in their detailed documentation of the potential advantages agencies may possess in deliberating on preemption compared with Congress and the courts.1 As they note,2 the quality of agency deliberation matters to two different debates. First, should an agency interpretation of statutory language to preempt state law receive Chevron deference in the courts, as other agency interpretations may, or should some lesser form of deference be given? Second, should a general statutory authorization to an agency to administer a program and to issue rules be read broadly to include the authority to declare state law preempted if the agency views that as an appropriate way to implement the program? (I have previously argued for both limited deference and a presumption against agency preemption.3)
Opening the Barnyard Door: Transparency and the Resurgence of Ag-Gag & Veggie Libel Laws

Over the past several decades, as the agricultural system became increasingly industrialized and the steps from farm to plate multiplied, consumers became farther removed from the sources of their food. Until recently, most consumers in America were content to eat their processed, cheap, and filling foods without giving a second thought to how these foods were produced. The tides are changing. Increasingly, consumers are calling for more transparency in the food system. Repulsed by images of animal cruelty and shocked by unsavory food production practices, consumers want the food industry’s veil lifted and are demanding changes in food production. The booming success of restaurants such as Chipotle, “the food industry’s fastest-rising star,” which serves “naturally-raised” meats and is committed to sourcing “Food with Integrity,” is evidence of this consumer demand for higher quality food. Undercover activists and outspoken food system critics can be credited with inciting this food revolution. The agricultural industry is waging war on two fronts in response—one aimed at the market and public opinion, and the other at the legislature. In response to falling earnings,
Games, Claims, and New Frames: Rethinking the Use of Simulation in Negotiation Education

Negotiation educators have long considered the use of role-play simulations as an essential classroom teaching method, and have had high expectations regarding their suitability and efficacy for teaching. In this article, we review the literature to examine the degree to which simulations deliver on these perceived benefits, finding that simulations enjoy only limited advantages over other teaching methods. We note three trends that have developed as part of this reevaluation process: improving the way simulations are conducted, deemphasizing the use of simulations as a teaching tool while seeking new methods, and finding paradigm-changing uses for simulations. With regard to this last trend, we describe our own experiments assigning students to design their own simulations, rather than participate in them as role players. Among other benefits of the design method, we found that designers showed greater improvements in concept learning and motivation than did role players.
Financial markets in times of stress

Abstract In this paper, we examine which markets are most synchronized internationally and exhibit the greater extent of co-movement. We focus on daily data for four asset markets: bonds, equities, foreign exchange, and domestic money market. Our sample covers 35 developed and emerging market countries during 1997–1999. The extent of co-movement and responsiveness to external shocks is examined in different ways. To measure the response of these markets to adverse external shocks, we date the peaks in domestic interest rates and bond spreads and the largest daily declines in equity prices and assess the extent of clustering around the same period. We also analyze which markets show evidence of greatest co-movement, in general, irrespective of whether there are adverse shocks or not.
Resource Management in Wireless Networks via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

We propose a mechanism for distributed resource management and interference mitigation in wireless networks using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL). We equip each transmitter in the network with a deep RL agent that receives delayed observations from its associated users, while also exchanging observations with its neighboring agents, and decides on which user to serve and what transmit power to use at each scheduling interval. Our proposed framework enables agents to make decisions simultaneously and in a distributed manner, unaware of the concurrent decisions of other agents. Moreover, our design of the agents’ observation and action spaces is scalable, in the sense that an agent trained on a scenario with a specific number of transmitters and users can be applied to scenarios with different numbers of transmitters and/or users. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to decentralized baselines in terms of the tradeoff between average and 5th percentile user rates, while achieving performance close to, and even in certain cases outperforming, that of a centralized information-theoretic baseline. We also show that our trained agents are robust and maintain their performance gains when experiencing mismatches between train and test deployments.
An Empirical Analysis of Search Engine Advertising: Sponsored Search in Electronic Markets

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising---where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (nonsponsored) Web search results---is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique six-month panel data set of several hundred keywords collected from a large nationwide retailer that advertises on Google, we empirically model the relationship between different sponsored search metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per click, and ranking of advertisements. Our paper proposes a novel framework to better understand the factors that drive differences in these metrics. We use a hierarchical Bayesian modeling framework and estimate the model using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Using a simultaneous equations model, we quantify the relationship between various keyword characteristics, position of the advertisement, and the landing page quality score on consumer search and purchase behavior as well as on advertiser's cost per click and the search engine's ranking decision. Specifically, we find that the monetary value of a click is not uniform across all positions because conversion rates are highest at the top and decrease with rank as one goes down the search engine results page. Though search engines take into account the current period's bid as well as prior click-through rates before deciding the final rank of an advertisement in the current period, the current bid has a larger effect than prior click-through rates. We also find that an increase in landing page quality scores is associated with an increase in conversion rates and a decrease in advertiser's cost per click. Furthermore, our analysis shows that keywords that have more prominent positions on the search engine results page, and thus experience higher click-through or conversion rates, are not necessarily the most profitable ones---profits are often higher at the middle positions than at the top or the bottom ones. Besides providing managerial insights into search engine advertising, these results shed light on some key assumptions made in the theoretical modeling literature in sponsored search.
Bond repurchase objectives and the repurchase method choice

Abstract This study investigates how firm׳s bond repurchase objective affects its choice of repurchase method. Unlike tender offers, open-market repurchases are not pre-announced and buyer׳s identity is unknown to the seller. We provide evidence that firms are likely to repurchase on the open-market when bonds are mispriced and when firms seek to manage their financial reports, either to meet earnings targets or avert debt covenant violations. When firms seek to amend indenture terms, they prefer tender offers. We also find that firm׳s information quality affects the likelihood of mispricing exploitation behavior and that insiders buy firm׳s stocks around open-market repurchases.
Costly Screens and Patent Examination

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has acquired a well-deserved reputation for inefficacy and inefficiency. Proposals for reforming the patent office have thus focused on improving the quality of patent review while decreasing its cost. Yet this view overlooks the valuable function performed by the high costs associated with obtaining a patent: these costs serve as an effective screen against low-value patents. Moreover, due to asymmetries in patent values, the costly screen is likely to select against socially harmful patents in disproportionate numbers. Although the patent office is the most prominent forum in which this type of costly screening operates, it is not the only one. In a variety of other contexts, the private costs of navigating an administrative process may complement the process itself in screening out unwanted participants.
Misappropriation of human eggs and embryos and the tort of conversion: a relational view.

Based on an analysis of the Irvine fertility scandal and other fertility cases, this article recommends that a conversion claim should be available to those whose genetic material has been misappropriated in fertility treatment. The proposed remedy would be based on classifying human embryos as neither persons nor property but as quasi-property.
The deadweight loss from ‘non-neutral’ capital income taxation

Abstract This paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model that treats explicitly the role of capital goods in the production process, and uses the model to measure the relative magnitudes of different distortions associated with capital income taxation (across industries, assets and time). One of the main results is that uniform capital income taxation is almost certainly suboptimal, theoritically, but that optimal deviations from uniform taxation are empirically inconsequencial. The paper also introduces and applies a general technique for distinguishing intergenerational transfers from efficiency gains in the analysis of the impact of policy changes on long-run welfare.
Moving from Intersection to Integration: Public Health Law Research and Public Health Systems and Services Research

Context: For three decades, experts have been stressing the importance of law to the effective operation of public health systems. Most recently, in a 2011 report, the Institute of Medicine recommended a review of state and local public health laws to ensure appropriate authority for public health agencies; adequate access to legal counsel for public health agencies; evaluations of the health effects and costs associated with legislation, regulations, and policies; and enhancement of research methods to assess the strength of evidence regarding the health effects of public policies. These recommendations, and the continued interest in law as a determinant of health system performance, speak to the need for integrating the emerging fields of Public Health Law Research (PHLR) and Public Health Systems and Services Research (PHSSR). Methods: Expert commentary. Findings: This article sets out a unified framework for the two fields and a shared research agenda built around three broad inquiries: (1) the structural role of law in shaping the organization, powers, prerogatives, duties, and limitations of public health agencies and thereby their functioning and ultimately their impact on public health (“infrastructure”); (2) the mechanisms through which public health system characteristics influence the implementation of interventional public health laws (“implementation”); and (3) the individual and system characteristics that influence the ability of public health systems and their community partners to develop and secure enactment of legal initiatives to advance public health (“innovation”). Research to date has laid a foundation of evidence, but progress requires better and more accessible data, a new generation of researchers comfortable in both law and health research, and more rigorous methods. Conclusions: The routine integration of law as a salient factor in broader PHSSR studies of public health system functioning and health outcomes will enhance the usefulness of research in supporting practice and the long-term improvement of system performance.
Probability, Explanation and Inference: A Reply:

This essay, published in a symposium issue on the “reference class problem” and legal evidence, replies to articles by Dale Nance, Mark Colyvan and Helen Regan, Robert Rhee, and Larry Laudan. We discuss the limits of probabilistic modeling of evidence and the relationship between such modeling and explanatory accounts of legal proof.
Ambient influences on municipal net assets: Evidence from panel data

Governments’ net assets balances are viewed as a measure of fiscal health and have been linked to municipal credit ratings. This study explores the extent to which ambient socioeconomic factors are captured in aggregated restricted and unrestricted net assets balances (termed “liquid net assets”) to understand why such balances are relevant to credit analysts and others. We model liquid net assets balances using observable nonaccounting factors (e.g., unemployment rates) to learn whether they reflect such influences. We use panel data for fiscal years 2007-2011 so our results comprehend effects of recent economic fluctuations. We find that liquid net assets balances impound a rich array of influences, bearing a positive association with the mayor-council form of government, community wealth, the incidence of property crimes, and increases in governments’ business-type net assets. Liquid net assets balances bear a negative association with liabilities for postemployment benefits, unemployment, and violent crime. The results indicate that net assets balances capture noteworthy debt burden, administrative, and socioeconomic influences and, as such, have meaning beyond their basic accounting interpretation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Sweet Caroline: The Backslide from Federal Rule of Evidence 613(b) to the Rule in Queen Caroline's Case

Since 1975, Rule 613(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence has governed the admission of extrinsic evidence of a prior inconsistent statement in federal court. Rule 613(b) requires the proponent of the prior inconsistent statement to provide the declarant an opportunity to explain or deny it. There is no requirement that the proponent provide that opportunity at any particular time or in any particular sequence. Rule 613 reflected a change from the common law that had fallen out of fashion in the federal courts. That common law rule, known as the Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case required the proponent of a prior inconsistent statement to confront the declarant witness with the statement on cross-examination before introducing any extrinsic evidence of the prior statement. For a variety of reasons, the Advisory Committee reasoned that the Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case constituted an unnecessary encumbrance on cross-examination.Despite the plain meaning of Rule 613(b), as further evidenced by the Advisory Committee’s Note, a number of federal courts have continued to apply the common law Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case citing assorted rationales for doing so. Their actions have caught the attention of the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules which has entertained the idea of amending Rule 613(b) to reflect the common law Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case.All things considered, amending Rule 613(b) to adopt the common law of thirty-five years ago is unwise. The English history behind the Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case undermines its credibility. Besides, Rule 613(b) accomplishes nearly all of the legitimate policy goals of that common law rule without hindering cross-examination. While there does exist a split among United States Courts of Appeals, most circuit courts apply Rule 613(b) as intended and only a minority of circuit courts apply the superseded Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case. Rather than amend Rule 613(b) to return to the common law Rule in Queen Caroline’s Case, the Advisory Committee should consider amending the Rule to make uniform the application of the Rule as originally intended. At the very least, the Advisory Committee should not amend Rule 613(b) to return Queen Caroline to her throne.
Parental Transfers, Student Achievement, and the Labor Supply of College Students

Using nationally representative data from the NLSY97 and a simultaneous equations model, this paper analyzes the financial motivations for and the effects of employment on U.S. college students’ academic performance. The data confirm the predictions of the theoretical model that lower parental transfers and greater costs of attending college increase the number of hours students work while in school, although students are not very responsive to these financial motivations. They also provide some evidence that greater hours of work lead to lower grade point averages (GPAs).
Public- and Private-School Competition: The Spatial Education Production Function

School vouchers may increase the competition that public-school districts face. Greater competition may spur public schools to improve student outcomes, which reliably predict labor market productivity and earnings. Previous school competition studies did not use spatial statistics, so they failed to incorporate spillovers and the effect of omitted variables into their education production functions. Significant spatial effects are found in all regressions, and spatial statistics improve adjusted R 2 values. There seems to be no consistent association between private-school attendance rates and public-school achievement, or between the number of public-school districts in a county and public-school performance. Competitive effects, which seem plausible in nonspatial regressions, dissipate when spatial statistics are used. When school inputs appeared to be statistically significant in nonspatial regressions, the spatial regressions generally made the significance disappear. Poverty appeared to depress reading and writing rates, but this effect disappeared in the spatial models.
The Two Eschatological Perspectives of the Book of Daniel

AbstractThe revelatory traditions found in chs. 2,7-12 of the book of Daniel are exceptional in connecting the historical circumstances pertaining to the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes with the eschatological hopes of the Hebrew Bible. We will argue that the nature of this connection is twofold. On the one hand, for the redactor who gave the book of Daniel its canonical form, the distress associated with Antiochus was the distress associated with the last days. On the other hand, for the original composers of the book of Daniel, the distress associated with Antiochus was only a precursor to the distress associated with the last days. Finally, we will apply the insights gained from making this argument to the question of the book of Daniel’s composition.
Confronting ADR Agreements' Contract/No-Contract Conundrum with Good Faith

This Article explores the intricate problem, or conundrum, of enforcing "Alternative Dispute Resolution ('ADR') agreements" that require mediation or other non-binding dispute resolution procedures. Although public policy supports ADR, courts' inadequate analysis of ADR agreements is threatening their vitality. Instead of properly considering the flexible nature of these agreements, courts assume formalist contract or no-contract conclusions similar to those they impose on what Professor Charles Knapp has termed "contracts to bargain." ADR agreements and other contracts to bargain pose enforcement problems because they require parties' cooperation without specifying what cooperation means or how to enforce such flexible duties. This Article confronts those problems and proposes that courts use duties of good faith and revived contract remedies to contextually enforce these agreements in proper cases.
Dominant strategy implementability and zero length cycles

Necessary conditions for dominant strategy implementability of an allocation function on a restricted type space are identified when utilities are quasilinear and the set of alternatives is finite. For any one-person mechanism obtained by fixing the other individuals’ types, the geometry of the partition of the type space into subsets that are allocated the same alternative is used to identify situations in which it is necessary for all of the cycle lengths in the corresponding allocation graph to be zero. It is shown that when all cycle lengths are zero, revenue equivalence holds and the set of all implementing payment functions can be characterized and computed quite simply using the lengths of the directed arcs between pairs of nodes in the allocation graph.
Complex Securities and Underwriter Reputation: Do Reputable Underwriters Produce Better Securities?

Conventional wisdom suggests that high-reputation banks will generally produce good securities to maintain their long-run reputation. We show with a simple model that, when securities are complex a high-reputation bank may produce assets that underperform during market downturns. We examine this possibility using a unique sample of $10.1 trillion of CLO, MBS, ABS, and CDOs. Contrary to the conventional view, securities issued by more reputable banks did not outperform but, rather, had higher proportions of capital in default.
Individual Academic Freedom: An Ordinary Concern of the First Amendment

This contribution to the Mississippi Law Journal's symposium on education law makes the case that individual academic freedom is not a "special concern of the First Amendment," as the Supreme Court has often said it is. The article tracks the academic freedom case law in the Court and establishes that, while the Court has often extolled the value and virtues of individual academic freedom in its opinion rhetoric, no case it has ever decided has depended for its resolution on a "special" individual right to speech or association that inheres only in academics. The article then fleshes out the implications of this claim for the speech rights of publicly employed academics following the Court's decision in Garcetti v. Ceballos, concluding both that the decision is here to stay, and that recent efforts to craft exceptions to it are unavailing due to the underlying doctrinal structure of the First Amendment.
What Do We Know about Competition Agencies in Emerging and Transition Countries? Evidence on Workload, Personnel, Priority Sectors, and Training Needs

During 2003, the World Bank Institute sent a needs assessment questionnaire to 48 competition agencies in transition and emerging countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Responses were classified according to the World Bank's analytical regional grouping and the evidence allows a cross-regional comparison of competition agencies' workload, personnel, priority sectors, and training needs. The view of competition authorities as a homogenous group across countries and regions can be discarded. The analysis of the needs assessment questionnaire shows that there are significant heterogeneities among competition agencies' mandates, exempted sectors, professional personnel endowment, and capacity needs. An important lesson for the design of training courses is that competition agencies do not need introductory courses. There is a significant demand for training on substance, on how to solve day-to-day technically challenging cases. Responses confirm the growing importance of competition policy issues in infrastructure services (such as market foreclosure and access to essential facilities) and the need to foster coordination between sector regulators and competition agencies.
Climate change litigation as pluralist legal dialogue

This thought piece will focus on the following question: What are the implications of conceptualizing of climate change litigation as pluralist legal dialogue? Part II provides the conceptual framework of the article by introducing and interweaving law and geography, judicial dialogue, and legal pluralism. Part III of the paper uses the example of California's role in climate change litigation to explore the idea of substate actors as international lawmakers. Part IV of the paper considers the example of supranational climate change petitions to engage the complex informal role that these petitions play in making law. Part V of the paper draws from these examples to analyze how a pluralist approach might address issues of scale and formality, and the implications of a hybrid model of international lawmaking for the regulation of anthropogenic climate change. The paper concludes with reflections on the significance of how legal boundaries are drawn for the development of more effective approaches to transnational regulatory governance.
Constitutional Concern, Membership, and Race

American Indian Tribes in the United States have a unique legal and political status shaped by fluctuating federal policies and the over-arching history of this country’s brand of settler-colonialism. One of the several legacies of this history is that federally recognized tribes have membership rules that diverge significantly from typical state or national citizenship criteria. These rules and their history are poorly understood by judges and members of the public, leading to misunderstandings about the “racial” status of tribes and Indian people, and on occasion to incoherent and damaging decisions on a range of Indian law issues. This article, which is part of a larger project on tribes, sovereignty, and race, will discuss the history of Florida’s tribes, their road from pre-contact independent peoples to federally recognized tribes, and their contemporary membership criteria in order to shed light on the inextricably political nature of race, membership and sovereignty in the American Indian context.
Association between Increased Emergency Contraception Availability and Risky Sexual Practices.

Objective We studied whether increased emergency contraception availability for women over age 18 was associated with a higher probability of risky sexual practices. Data A total of 34,030 individual/year observations on 3,786 women aged 18 and older were extracted from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 from October 1999 through November 2009. Study Design We modeled three binary outcome variables: any sexual activity; sexual activity with more than one partner; and any sex without a condom for women with multiple partners for women in states with state-level policy changes (prior to the 2006 FDA ruling) and for women in states subject to only the national policy change both jointly and separately. Findings We found different results when estimating the state and federal changes separately. The national change was associated with a reduction in the probability of sexual activity, a reduction in the likelihood of reporting multiple partnerships, and there was no relationship between the national policy change and unprotected sexual activity. There was no relationship between the probability of sexual activity or multiple partnerships for women in states with their own policy changes, but we did find that women in these states were more likely to report unprotected sex.
The Ups and Downs of State Budget Process Reform: Experience of Three Decades

From zero-base budgeting to the Government Performance and Results Act, state budgeting systems have been synonymous with budgeting reform for over 30 years. This article examines the trends, both long-term and short-term, which have been identified through analysis of state budgeting office practices. Particular emphasis has been placed on understanding the changes in performance measurement over the period of 1970 to 2000. The findings reveal trends such as changes in the makeup of budget office personnel, a lack of budget offices in moving toward cost accounting, and trends in budget preparation and budget documents. Some budget reforms seem to have plateaued, beginning in the mid-1990s, while other reforms have exhibited “backsliding.” It is clear that the states are not all marching in unison in reforming their budget systems. As with earlier phases of this study, the 2000 data raise many questions that will be explored in future research.
Democratization or repression

Abstract Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a sign a weakness and spur further unrest and more radical demands. The elite may therefore be forced to choose between repression and the most generous concession, a transition to full democracy.
GAME OF THE NAMES: BRANDING IN SMARTPHONE INDUSTRY

Brand name and product positioning have been a critical issue in the field of branding, especially for the growing market of smartphones. The booming market has made industry to invest more capital in research and development of more sophisticated devices featuring advanced features from basic calling technology to advance computing. Many companies have developed various technologies differentiating themselves from their competitors. The companies are seen following a particular pattern of updating on particular attributes of their products. The purpose of the research study is to understand the preferences of consumers in an experimental item and main item setup. This study explores the fundamental change in preferences along the basic features of a smartphone and change in purchase intentions due to influence of brand title. The study uses paired sample t test, conjoint analysis, and positioning mapping to address the issue of brand influence in experimental item and main item setup. The study uses the Euclidean distance model to explore the dimensions that define particular brands. Overall the study concludes by proving the effect of brand title on preferences and defining the dimensions along which brands are compared.
Pharmaceutical Lemons: Innovation and Regulation in the Drug Industry

Before a new drug can be marketed the Food and Drug Administration must be satisfied that it is safe and effective. According to conventional wisdom, the cost and delay involved in this process diminish the incentives to invest in the development of new drugs. Accordingly, several reforms aimed at restoring such incentives have been implemented and others have been advocated. This paper challenges the central argument in the debate on the topic, namely that drug regulation and drug innovation are necessarily at odds with each other. Although intuitively appealing, the argument that drug regulation negatively affects the incentives to innovate does not fully capture the role that regulation plays in this industry. This paper shows that the regulatory framework is not solely a burden imposed on the industry; it also provides a valuable service to the industry. Specifically, drug regulation provides certification of drug quality. Such certification, which may not be easily achieved by private market-based mechanisms, prevents the market from becoming a market for "lemons". Therefore, rather than decreasing the expected returns to innovation, this aspect of regulation contributes to the value of new drugs and may actually encourage innovation. This point has largely been absent from most cost-benefit analyses of drug regulation, yet without it any discussion of the merits of regulation is incomplete.
Authors, publishers, and public goods: Trading gold for dross

The article seeks to clarify what is at stake - and what is not - in the litigation challenging the constitutional validity of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). First, the article distinguishes between the CTEA's retrospective term extension of copyright term and the retrospective extensions enacted by prior Congresses. The article suggests that the CTEA provisions are constitutionally questionable in ways that earlier retrospective extensions may not have been. To hold the CTEA unconstitutional would not make all other term extensions vulnerable. Second, the article shows how non-creative physical activities such as digitization and film preservation have public goods characteristics that did not attach to equivalent physical activities (such as typesetting) in the eighteenth century. The article argues that, nevertheless, no expansion of the Copyright Clause is triggered by this new susceptibility to free riding. The Constitution does not treat all public goods problems similarly. For example, the Constitution singles out only some public goods for federal concern (e.g., national defense), while leaving others to state and local discretion. Implicit in the Supreme Court's existing jurisprudence is a finding that the Copyright Clause of the Constitution treats the free-rider problems faced by non-creative public goods (such as digitization and restoration of old media) differently from the free-rider problems faced by creative public goods (such as works of authorship). The article argues that the Copyright Clause is exclusively or primarily concerned with providing remedies for the latter. The article thus suggests that the CTEA's retrospective extension embodies a constitutionally impermissible tradeoff because it uses federal power to gain - at most - some encouragement for non-creative activity, while discouraging the creative activity with whose encouragement Congress was originally entrusted. In addition, the article reviews and expands on the usual economic arguments for limiting the duration of intellectual property. In particular, the article uses the Nirvana Fallacy to show the dynamics that can hide behind the usual unitary notion of "deadweight loss," and recasts another phrase from the language of economics - the "increased costs of creation" - in a way that makes clear the aesthetic and psychological costs imposed by a long copyright.
A New Approach to Country Segmentation Utilizing Multinational Diffusion Patterns

Country segmentation has been proposed to assist in marketing strategy decisions for international marketing managers. Such schemes typically consist of grouping or clustering a set of specified co...
Shareholder Bargaining Power, Debt Overhang, and Investment

Using a dynamic model of strategic bargaining between equity and debt holders following default, we analyze the impact of shareholder bargaining power on the investment effects of debt overhang. Our empirical tests utilize a new measure of debt overhang wedge based on default probabilities generated from a hazard model for bankruptcy. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, bondholder (shareholder) ownership concentration ceteris paribus enhances (weakens) the overhang wedge and dampens (increases) capital investment. We identify novel ownership structure related factors in firm-level capital investment and document how post-default shareholder bargaining power alleviates the underinvestment problem caused by debt overhang.
A Modest Proposal for Human Limitations on Cyberdiscovery

Many lawyers, whether by training or disposition, have come to regard discovery as a process in which no stone is to be left unturned. With the advent of electronically stored information, the stones have become too numerous to account. Discovery rules that seek the perfection of preserving and producing all potentially pertinent information have become the enemy of the good. This article calls for a more pragmatic—and modest— approach. INTRODUCTION 965 I. ESI IS DIFFERENT 968 A. The Challenges of ESI 968 B. Responding to the Challenges 970 C. The Inadequacy of the Response 974 D. The Implications of Inadequacy 975 II. ANOTHER RESPONSE 976 A. A Modest Presumption 976 B. Cost Allocation 979 CONCLUSION 980
Bicameralism and Government Formation

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary democracy on the formation and stability of coalition governments. We then apply our methodology to estimate the effects of governmental bicameralism. Our main findings are that eliminating bicameralism does not affect government durability, but does have a significant effect on the composition of governments leading to smaller coalitions. These results are due to an equilibrium replacement effect: removing bicameralism affects the relative durability of coalitions of different sizes which in turn induces changes in the coalitions that are chosen in equilibrium.
Measuring Voters’ Multidimensional Policy Preferences with Conjoint Analysis: Application to Japan’s 2014 Election

Representative democracy entails the aggregation of multiple policy issues by parties into competing bundles of policies, or “manifestos,” which are then evaluated holistically by voters in elections. This aggregation process obscures the multidimensional policy preferences underlying a voter’s single choice of party or candidate. We address this problem through a conjoint experiment based on the actual party manifestos in Japan’s 2014 House of Representatives election. By juxtaposing sets of issue positions as hypothetical manifestos and asking respondents to choose one, our study identifies the effects of specific positions on the overall assessment of manifestos, heterogeneity in preferences among subgroups of respondents, and the popularity ranking of manifestos. Our analysis uncovers important discrepancies between voter preferences and the portrayal of the election results by politicians and the media as providing a policy mandate to the Liberal Democratic Party, underscoring the potential danger of inferring public opinion from election outcomes alone.
Customer-Base Concentration: Implications for Audit Pricing and Quality

ABSTRACT What are the implications of major customer dependency, i.e., the degree of a supplier firm's dependency on its major customers, for external auditors? While the conventional view emphasiz...
Statutory rape law and enforcement in the wake of welfare reform.

The recent national efforts at reforming the welfare system and new research on the connection between teen pregnancy and statutory rape have led many states to enact stricter laws against statutory rape and to increase the enforcement of existing laws. Punitive statutory rape laws are being viewed more and more as a mechanism for shrinking the welfare rolls by reducing teen pregnancy. Rigel Oliveri documents the resurgence of statutory rape law and enforcement and explores the ramifications it will have on teen parents. In particular Oliveri approaches the issue from several analytical frameworks discussing arguments for consent-based standards the privacy and substantive due process rights of both teens and offenders and the practical needs of parenting teens. She also examines some of the theoretical tensions and pitfalls inherent in the criminal prosecution of teen pregnancies. This discussion leads to suggestions for possible improvements in the prosecution of statutory rape cases as well as to the more radical proposal to eliminate many statutory rape laws altogether. (authors)
The Method and Role of Comparative Law

In this article, I argue that we must reassess the role and methodology of comparative law so that we can come up with a sound methodological framework to understand better the role of law in different countries as a way of promoting insight and knowledge and, hopefully, a measure of common understanding. My proposal for comparative methodology consists of these steps: Rule 1 consists of acquiring the skills of a comparativist. That skill calls for immersion in the culture under review, linguistic knowledge, and the application of neutral, objective evaluative skills. In Rule 2 we will apply comparative skill to evaluate the external law, consisting of the law as written or stated. Here we must do a close assessment of the similarities and differences of the law of different countries under review. Rule 3 will involve applying the same methodology to the internal law, consisting of the law that lies beneath external law yet has important influences on the formation of law. These can be phenomena like religion, politics, custom, geography or climate. Finally, Rule 4 will involve assembling the results of comparative investigation in order to determine what we can learn from a foreign legal system and how that insight might reflect on our own legal system. I then discuss the mission of comparative law. Here we need to employ comparative law methodology to help shed insight into nonwestern countries, such as emerging powers like China and India, and help solve pressing public policy questions, like antitrust, informational privacy or consumer protection.