cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Enhancing motor learning by increasing stability of newly formed dendritic spines in motor cortex

SUMMARY Dendritic spine dynamics of Layer 5 Pyramidal neurons (L5PNs) are thought to be physical substrates for motor learning and memory of motor skills and altered spine dynamics are frequently correlated with poor motor performance. Here we describe an exception to this rule by studying mice lacking Paired immunoglobulin receptor B (PirB−/−). Using chronic two-photon imaging of primary motor cortex (M1) of PirB−/−;Thy1-YFP-H mice, we found a significant increase in the survival of spines on apical dendritic tufts of L5PNs, as well as increased spine formation rates and spine density. Surprisingly and contrary to expectations, adult PirB−/− mice learn a skilled reaching task more rapidly compared to wild type (WT) littermate controls. Conditional excision of PirB from forebrain pyramidal neurons in adult mice replicated these results. Furthermore, chronic imaging of L5PN dendrites throughout the learning period revealed that the stabilization of learning-induced newly formed spines is significantly elevated in PirB−/− mice. The degree of survival of newly formed spines in M1 yielded the strongest correlation with task performance, suggesting that this increased spine stability is advantageous and can translate into enhanced acquisition and maintenance of motor skills. Notably, inhibiting PirB function acutely in M1 of adult WT mice throughout training increases the survival of spines formed during early training and enhances motor learning. These results suggest that increasing the stability of newly formed spines is sufficient to improve long-lasting learning and motor performance and demonstrate that there are limits on motor learning that can be lifted by manipulating PirB, even in adulthood.
Complexity, Flexibility, and the Make-or-Buy Decision

65 years ago, Ronald Coase (1937) asked what determines whether production will be organized in a firm or through the market, later coined the "make-or-buy" decision. This question was put center stage by Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985) who further developed Transaction Costs Economics(TCE), arguing that incomplete contracts and specific relationships overshadowed by opportunism, asymmetric information and bounded rationality, will lead vertical processes to integrate. Benjamin Klein et al. (1978) enhanced TCE with the "hold-up" problem: in the face of incomplete contracts, specificity and opportunistic behavior, integration can help promote ex ante investment incentives. Sanford Grossman and Oliver Hart (1986) (followed by Hart and John Moore (1990)) developed the Property Rights Theory (PRT) of the firm (See Hart, 1995). PRT formally model the hold-up problem, offered a precise definition of integration via ownership and residual control rights, and analyzed the costs and benefits of integration in a unified manner. However, PRT narrowed the focus of the make-or-buy question on one type of transaction cost - the hold up problem. This paper focuses attention on a different kind of transaction cost: haggling and friction due to ex post changes and adaptations when contracts are incomplete. The level of a transaction's complexity, which is associated with contractual incompleteness, will be the shifting parameter that determines both incentive schemes and integration decisions. This focus is motivated by a careful examination of procurement decisions in industry, and has strong empirical content since the exogenous shifter (complexity) seems easier to measure than specificity.
Prospective Abolition of Abortion: Abortion and the Constitution in 2047

What if those who fashioned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, instead of drawing a geographical line in the sand, had drawn a 'time'-line instead, prohibiting slavery at a then-seemingly-distant date of 1860, forty long years into the future? Might the events of 1860 (and thereafter) played out much differently? Is it possible slavery would have been abolished sooner, and without the loss of 600,000 lives in the Civil War? This short essay asks the question of whether abortion might be prohibited by constitutional amendment, effective some forty years in the future. Might it be possible to reach consensus that an absolute, unrestricted right to abortion should not exist forever?
Who Bears the Cost of Agricultural Support in OECD Countries

This paper provides quantitative estimates of the impact of removing agricultural support in both OECD and developing countries in partial and general equilibrium frameworks. The results show that agricultural support in OECD countries is highly distortionary, and tariffs have a larger distortionary impact than subsidies. Removal of agricultural support would likely raise the international prices of food, resulting in an increase in the cost of food for many net-food importing countries, although the size of the increase is generally small. The results also show that most of the benefits from removing agricultural support accrue to the countries that liberalise.
Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motives: Standard and Behavioral Approaches To Agency and Labor Markets

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly stylized assumptions regarding human motivation, e.g., that employees seek to earn as much money as possible with minimal effort. In this essay, we explore the consequences of introducing behavioral complexity and realism into models of agency within organizations. Specifically, we assess the insights gained by allowing employees to be guided by such motivations as the desire to compare favorably to others, the aspiration to contribute to intrinsically worthwhile goals, and the inclination to reciprocate generosity or exact retribution for perceived wrongs. More provocatively, from the standpoint of standard economics, we also consider the possibility that people are driven, in ways that may be opaque even to themselves, by the desire to earn social esteem or to shape and reinforce identity.
Permanent and transitory policy shocks in an empirical macro model with asymmetric information

Abstract An empirical model that allows for shifts in the inflation target and imperfect policy credibility is estimated. Imperfect credibility, defined by differences between the perceived and actual inflation target, obtains because private agents cannot correctly distinguish between permanent target shocks and transitory funds rate shocks. Learning affects responses to structural shocks. Important features include the absence of a price puzzle, permanent nominal effects of aggregate supply shocks due to partial policy accommodation, and the ability to examine responses to a permanent target change and expectations shocks. Perceptions of permanent target shocks explain sizable movements in bond yields and inflation.
OPEN GOVERNMENT AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE UNITED STATES

The promotion of transparency has long been identified with the goal of holding democratic governments (and sometimes the private sector) responsible. In recent years, advocates of “open government” have argued that, beyond mere accountability, transparency can be a positive instrument of public policy — a means of shaping social and economic behavior that differs qualitatively from fiscal incentives or regulatory punishments. Yet while transparency initiatives are easy enough to enact, they often fail to reshape the incentives of key actors, including government agencies and market players subject to disclosure rules, and hence fail to ignite meaningful changes in the direction or scope of public policy. And in some cases, policymakers have also developed powerful new tools to restrict the flow of information, which remain outside the purview of sunshine laws altogether.
Exporting standards: The externalization of the EU's regulatory power via markets

Abstract This Article examines the unprecedented and deeply underestimated global power that the EU is exercising through its legal institutions and standards, and how it successfully exports that influence to the rest of the world. Introducing the notion of “the Brussels Effect,” the Article shows how market forces alone are sufficient to convert EU standards into global standards. Without the need to use international institutions or seek other nations’ cooperation, the EU has a strong and growing ability to promulgate regulations that become entrenched in the legal frameworks of developed and developing markets alike, leading to a notable “Europeanization” of many important aspects of global commerce. This Article identifies and explains the precise conditions for and the specific mechanism through which this externalization of EU's standards unfolds. Enhanced understanding of this dynamic explains why the EU is currently the only jurisdiction that can wield unilateral influence across a number of areas of law, ranging from competition and privacy to health and environmental regulation. This understanding also helps explain why certain regulations can be externalized via markets while others rely on the EU's ability to exert influence through its political agency. The Article further disputes the notion that the EU's ability to externalize its rules would reflect “regulatory imperialism,” as critics have suggested. Instead, it argues that the EU's external regulatory influence has emerged largely as an inadvertent byproduct of its internal goal to create and strengthen the single market. The EU's regulatory authority has been further solidified as the markets, other states, and international institutions have been able to do little to constrain Europe's global regulatory power. In the end, as much as the rise of the EU's regulatory power is a product of its pursuit of internal goals, any limits to this power are likely to stem from within the EU itself.
Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones

With the ubiquity of mobile touchscreen devices like smartphones, two widely used text entry methods have emerged: small touch-based keyboards and speech recognition. Although speech recognition has been available on desktop computers for years, it has continued to improve at a rapid pace, and it is currently unknown how today's modern speech recognizers compare to state-of-the-art mobile touch keyboards, which also have improved considerably since their inception. To discover both methods' “upper-bound performance,” we evaluated them in English and Mandarin Chinese on an Apple iPhone 6 Plus in a laboratory setting. Our experiment was carried out using Baidu's Deep Speech 2, a deep learning-based speech recognition system, and the built-in Qwerty (English) or Pinyin (Mandarin) Apple iOS keyboards. We found that with speech recognition, the English input rate was 2.93 times faster (153 vs. 52 WPM), and the Mandarin Chinese input rate was 2.87 times faster (123 vs. 43 WPM) than the keyboard for short message transcription under laboratory conditions for both methods. Furthermore, although speech made fewer errors during entry (5.30% vs. 11.22% corrected error rate), it left slightly more errors in the final transcribed text (1.30% vs. 0.79% uncorrected error rate). Our results show that comparatively, under ideal conditions for both methods, upper-bound speech recognition performance has greatly improved compared to prior systems, and might see greater uptake in the future, although further study is required to quantify performance in non-laboratory settings for both methods.
The Most Scholarly Justices

Supreme Court justices both use and produce legal scholarship. This article identifies the ten most scholarly justices, based on both productivity and impact.
Optimal Stopping for Dynamic Convex Risk Measures

We use martingale and stochastic analysis techniques to study a continuous-time optimal stopping problem, in which the decision maker uses a dynamic convex risk measure to evaluate future rewards. We also find a saddle point for an equivalent zero-sum game of control and stopping, between an agent (the “stopper”) who chooses the termination time of the game, and an agent (the “controller”, or “nature”) who selects the probability measure.
Can There Be a Burden of the Best Explanation

In this article I address a foundational question in evidence law: how should judges and jurors reason with evidence? According to a widely accepted approach, legal fact-finding should involve a de...
Measuring Corporate Tax Preferences

This paper examines the measurement of corporate tax preferences. It develops a model of corporate investment in which a certain fraction of the investment is immediately expensed. This model is representative of the treatment of costs associated with internally developed intangible assets, which generally are expensed for both financial reporting and tax purposes. Analysis of the model shows that accounting‐based measures of tax preferences are deficient because such measures detect only tax preferences that generate book‐tax differences. The paper then proposes a new measure in which pre‐tax accounting income is replaced by pre‐tax stock market returns, which detects tax‐favored investments regardless of their financial accounting treatment. A comparison of the two measures for a sample of firms between 1992 and 1996 indicates that tax preferences are substantially higher than accounting‐based measures suggest.
OPT-OUT VOTING

I. INTRODUCTION Imagine for a moment that you are a registered voter casting a ballot in the U.S. presidential election. What generally happens in such an election today is that you acquire a ballot—either by making the journey to a polling place on election day (or in the days leading up to election day) or receiving a ballot, such as an absentee ballot, by mail just prior to the election. 1 That ballot has the eligible candidates listed on it. You select the candidate you prefer—by filling in an oval, pressing a button on the machine, or some other method of marking the ballot— then cast your vote and proceed with your usual daily routine. 2 Now imagine a different type of system. In this system, your local election administrator mails you a ballot. And instead of having to check off a box for a candidate, you already have a candidate randomly preselected for you. At this point, you have several options: (1) do nothing and your vote will be cast for your pre-selected candidate; (2) change your vote from the pre-selected candidate to another candidate and mail notice of that change to the local election administrator; or (3) mail to the local election administrator notice of a change in your vote from the pre-selected candidate to the category of ―None of the Above.‖ This latter system is what I will refer to in this paper as ―opt-out voting,‖ and what opt-out voting accomplishes is to change the default rule for electoral participation. The system currently used in the United
The corporate governance behavior and market value of Russian firms

Abstract I examine the relationship between corporate governance behavior and market value for a sample of 21 Russian firms. I use (1) fall 1999 corporate governance rankings for these firms, developed by a Russian investment bank, and (2) the ‘value ratio’ of actual market capitalization to potential Western market capitalization for these firms, determined independently by a second Russian investment bank. The correlation between ln(value ratio) and governance ranking is striking and statistically strong: Pearson r =0.90 ( t =8.97). A worst (51 ranking) to best (7 ranking) governance improvement predicts a 700-fold increase in firm value. These results are tentative because of the small sample, but they suggest that corporate governance behavior has a powerful effect on market value in a country where legal and cultural constraints on corporate behavior are weak.
Does the Market Value CEO Styles

Abstract We study how investors perceive the skill set that different types of CEOs bring into their companies. We compare CEOs who started their careers during a recession with other CEOs. We show...
What’s happened over the past 10 years to the selection of retired CEOs as board members?

I analyze directorships held by CEOs who retired during 1989-1993 and during 1998-2002. My results suggest that retired CEOs became more popular on boards. Also, although pre-retirement accounting performance helps explain the number of outside directorships a retired CEO held in the 1989-1993 sample as Brickley, Linck, and Coles (1999) found, it does not in the 1998-2002 sample. Third, a company's stock performance during a CEO's tenure affects whether he became an inside director of that company after retirement. A 25% change in stock price performance increased the probability by 11% in the 1989-1993 sample, and 51% in the 1998-2002 sample. Finally, if a retired CEO worked in a regulated industry, his probability of serving at least one outside directorship fell by 34% in the 1989-1993 sample, and 24% in the 1998-2002 sample.
Faith in Justice: Fiduciaries, Malpractice & Sexual Abuse by Clergy

Faith in Justice: Fiduciaries, Malpractice & Sexual Abuse by Clergy addresses in depth the subject of sexual misconduct by religious clerics. Several courts have addressed the issue of "clergy malpractice," none explicitly recognizing it as a cause of action. Many courts have also addressed clergy sexual misconduct and have contemplated the appropriate cause of action for such situations. Among these courts, there is a split of authority regarding whether these actions are permissible under the First Amendment. The outcomes of the respective jurisdictions are dependent on whether the court determines that the appropriate cause of action is one for breach of fiduciary duty or is for malpractice. Thus, this article first turns to the doctrinal area of tort, focusing on a comparison of malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty and their respective capacities for compliance with First Amendment prohibitions. This article examines the interpretations and general applications of the religion clauses of the First Amendment with particular focus on prohibitions against sexual misconduct. It engages in a comparison of the judicial treatment of sexual harassment by clergy under Title VII as guidance for treatment of sexual misconduct by clergy. An analogy of religious organizations to families, with regard to a general theory of state intervention in the affairs of religious organizations, further illuminates the importance of this topic. The ultimate purposes of this article are both to find a means of redress for victims of sexual abuse and to assist religious institutions in avoiding becoming an inadvertent refuge for sexual predators.
Optimal Taxation in an RBC Model: A Linear-Quadratic Approach ⁄

We reconsider the optimal taxation of income from labor and capital in the stochastic growth model analyzed by Chari et al. (1994, 1995), but using a linear-quadratic (LQ) approximation to derive a log-linear approximation to the optimal policy rules. The example illustrates how inaccurate \naive" LQ approximation | in which the quadratic objective is obtained from a simple Taylor expansion of the utility function of the representative household | can be, but also shows how a correct LQ approximation can be obtained, which will provide a correct local approximation to the optimal policy rules in the case of small enough shocks. We also consider the numerical accuracy of the LQ approximation in the case of shocks of the size assumed in the calibration of Chari et al. We flnd that the correct LQ approximation yields results that are quite accurate, and similar in most respects to the results obtained by Chari et al. using a more computationally intensive numerical method.
Measuring plant level energy efficiency and technical change in the U.S. metal-based durable manufacturing sector using stochastic frontier analysis

Abstract This study analyzes the electric and fuel energy efficiency for five different metal-based durable manufacturing industries in the United States over the time period 1987–2012, at the 3 digit North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) level. Using confidential plant-level data on energy use and production from the quinquennial U.S. Economic Census, a stochastic frontier regression analysis (SFA) is applied in six repeated cross sections for each five year census. The SFA controls for energy prices and climate-driven energy demand (heating degree days HDD and cooling degree days CDD) due to differences in plant level locations, as well as 6-digit NAICS industry effects. Own energy price elasticities range from −0.7 to −1.0, with electricity tending to have slightly higher elasticity than fuel. Mean efficiency estimates (100% = best practice level) range from a low of 33% (fuel, NAICS 334 - Computer and Electronic Products) to 86% (electricity, NAICS 332 - Fabricated Metal Products). Electric efficiency is consistently better than fuel efficiency for all NAICS. Assuming that all plants in the least efficient quartile of the efficiency distribution achieve a median level of performance, we compute the decline in total energy use to be 21%. A Malmquist index is used to decompose the aggregate change in energy performance into indices of efficiency and frontier (best practice) change. Modest improvements in aggregate energy performance are mostly change in best practice, but failure to keep up with the frontier retards aggregate improvement. Given that the best practice frontier has shifted, we also find that firms entering the industry are statistically more efficient, i.e. closer to the frontier; about 0.6% for electricity and 1.7% for fuels on average.
Virtual Reality: Barter and Restructuring in Russian Industry

A general consensus in the transition economies literature links the existence of enterprise restructuring with the pace of the transition process and the potential for economic growth. The existing literature is less clear, however, about whether the lack of economic growth is caused by the lack of enterprise restructuring. Complicating the debate in Russia is the confusion regarding the role of barter transactions in enterprise restructuring. Much of the confusion is generated by proponents of a "virtual economy" interpretation of how the Russian economy and Russian enterprise managers operate. This paper dispels much of the confusion about the existence of enterprise restructuring and the corresponding role of barter by demonstrating why the virtual economy model fails to accurately depict economic actions or outcomes in Russia. We develop the argument that barter is closely related to an absence of liquidity in the Russian economy, using both macro-level and micro-level data to document the consequences of "structural illiquidity." Our results are unambiguous: both the incidence and volume of barter transactions are inversely related to liquidity. We conclude that analyses using barter transactions as evidence of the lack of enterprise restructuring in Russia stem from: (1) the lack of clear consensus about what constitutes enterprise restructuring in transition economies and how it varies with the stage of the transition process; (2) errant assumptions about managers' objective functions; (3) the relative mix of formal and informal restructuring mechanisms; (4) the lack of attention to industry variation and, within industry, to managerial characteristics; and (5) the Texan complex (if it ain't big, it ain't ...) which causes analysts to ignore changes in enterprise operations unless they occur on a grandiose scale.
A Prospective Analysis of Family Fragmentation: Baby Mama Drama meets Jane Austen

“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favor of Matrimony...” Nineteenth century novelist Jane Austen, a single woman all her life in a socio-legal culture that afforded women no legal or economic rights, understood the consequences of a lack of income and wealth, and wrote about it from a perspective that entertained millions while teaching readers about old English laws of primogeniture and the consequences to single women. While never a mother, Austen’s insight and advice are salient today in a prospective analysis of broken or never-formed families, commonly described as family fragmentation. Family fragmentation has significant societal effects on family law. Never-formed families are generally characterized by non-marital childbearing, and are often comprised of impoverished single mothers with young children. Accompanied by a drop in marriage rates in the United States, unmarried child bearing is the essence of a never-formed family, and may be contributing to a very noticeable gap in marriage and income inequality. Because the millennial generation will have the lowest rates of marriage by age 40 than any previous generation, and marriage tends to increase wealth and income, the economic welfare of current and future children raised without a married mother and father, and their future families, may be in jeopardy. There is increasing evidence that family form is one causal factor in these outcomes, but it is also true that poverty and other factors go a long way in explaining the differential. A brief exploration of the effects of never-formed families on American society may prove helpful for the future of American families and family law. Here, Baby Mama Drama will meet Jane Austen, a woman who keenly understood the plight of single women.This article considers the scope, direction and pace of changes in families and family law with a focus on never-formed families to discuss what effects those changes may produce in America and in American law in the future. Part I considers the law and economics of never-formed families as manifested in single motherhood. From 1985 to 2015, child birth statistics and parental obligations are examined in the context of societal economics. In the framework of single motherhood as characterizing the lion’s share of never-formed families the article then examines fatherlessness and its effect on children and society at large. It also considers how the notion of human capital is either advanced or subjugated for individuals in never-formed families. Part II then considers marriage law trends, the marriage market and income inequality in the context of family fragmentation and never-formed families. Part III offers an attempt to look down the road ahead for the future of the family in light of the never-formed family trend, from 2015 to 2045. This section examines marriage markets and suggests policy changes to strengthen families for the next generation.
The Dynamics of Organizational Learning

This paper presents a dynamical theory of organizational learning that explicitly accounts for both the introduction of new routines into the manufacturing process i>and improvements in the selection of which procedures to follow. Besides producing a power law of organizational learning with a rate that depends on the effectiveness of the decision procedure, the theory also accounts for observed anomalies characterized by price increases with cumulative output.
A theoretical analysis of income tax evasion, optimal auditing, and credibility in developing countries

We first construct a theoretical model of tax evasion in a stylized developing country in which all taxpayers have either high or low income. The key problem is that the high-income taxpayers may underreport their income. An individual income tax return can only be verified with an audit that costs c. There is a constant tax rate τ on income and a fine F on underpaid tax. In this setting, we analyze two cases. In the first case, the tax authority pre-commits to its audit policy. We determine the optimal audit policy for the tax authority and then we discuss why this policy is not credible. In the second case, there is a fixed proportion of high-income taxpayers who report their income truthfully. In this context, we first study the properties of a credible audit policy. Then, we examine the impact of an increase in the three parameters (c, τ, F) on the equilibrium audit policy.
Are Scholars Better Bloggers? Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship

These are the opening remarks I delivered at the Symposium on Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006. Part One describes how my work on TaxProf Blog and the Law Professor Blog Network led me to organize this Symposium. Part Two takes inspiration from Jim Lindgren's work, Are Scholars Better Teachers?, to ask, using our twenty-three panelists as guinea pigs, Are Scholars Better Bloggers? The data indicate that our participants include some of the most heavily-cited and heavily-downloaded legal scholars who edit many of the most heavily-trafficked law blogs. Although the data do not do not conclusively answer the question raised, they demonstrate that we have assembled an impressive array of scholar-bloggers in the first conference on the impact of blogs on legal scholarship.The papers and commentary are organized around four themes: (1) Law Blogs as Legal Scholarship (papers by Doug Berman, Orin Kerr, Kate Litvak, and Larry Solum; commentary by Jim Lindgren and Ellen Podgor); (2) The Role of the Law Professor Blogger (papers by Gail Heriot, Gordon Smith, and Eugene Volokh; commentary by Randy Barnett and Michael Froomkin); (3) Blogs, First Amendment Law, and Co-Blogging Law (papers by Glenn Reynolds and Eric Goldman; commentary by Dan Solove and Betsy Malloy); and (4) The Many Faces of Law Professor Blogs (papers by Ann Althouse, Christine Hurt & Tung Yin, and Larry Ribstein; commentary by Howard Bashman and Paul Butler). Paul Butler perhaps best captured the spirit of the Symposium with this clarion call: Blogs are walking up to legal scholarship and slapping it in the face. Blogs say to legal scholarship: 'How dare you! Evolve or Die!' ... I feel like I am part of a movement that could change the world.
False Negatives Under a Discount Attribution Test for Bundled Discounts

Most of us love the idea of saving money by purchasing multiple products at once. But are better deals always good for competition and consumers? Answering this question requires a headlong dive into the puzzle of bundling and bundled discounts, and the short answer is: “not always.” Bundled discounts include “buy one, get one” offers, prix-fixe dinner specials, and rebates for meeting multi-product sales targets, to name a few prominent examples. A bundled discount occurs “when a seller offers a collection of different goods for a lower price than the aggregate price for which it would sell the constituent products individually.” The “defining characteristic” of bundled discounts is that “they are multi-product, purchase target discounts—they are conditioned upon purchasing some quantum of goods from multiple product markets.” This Article considers the legal rules used to determine whether a particular instance of bundled discounting is anticompetitive, and it identifies weaknesses
Rape Beyond Crime.

Public health experts agree that sexual violence constitutes a significant public health issue. Yet criminal law dominates rape law almost completely, with public health law playing at best a small supporting role. Recent civil law developments, such as university disciplinary proceedings, similarly fixate on how best to find and penalize perpetrators. As a result, rape law continues to spin its wheels in the same arguments and obstacles. This Article argues that, without broader cultural changes, criminal law faces a double bind: rape laws will either be ineffective or neglect the importance of individual culpability. Public health law provides more promising terrain for rape prevention because it is a strong legal framework that can engage the complex causes of rape, including the social norms that promote sexual aggression. While criminal law can only punish bad behavior, public health interventions can use the more effective prevention strategy of promoting positive behaviors and relationships. They can also address the myriad sexual behaviors and social determinants that increase the risk of rape but are outside the scope of criminal law. Perhaps most importantly, public health law relies on evidence-based interventions and the expertise of public health authorities to ensure that laws and policies are effective. Transforming rape law in this way provides a framework for legal feminism to undertake the unmet challenge of "theorizing yes," that is, moving beyond how to protect women’s right to refuse sex and toward promoting and exploring positive models of sex. Criminal law is simply incapable of meeting this challenge because it concerns only what sex should not be. A public health framework can give the law a richer role in addressing the full spectrum of sexual attitudes and behaviors.
Occupational Choice and Dynamic Incentives

We study an overlapping generations version of the principal-agent problem, where incentive contracts are determined in general equilibrium. All individuals are workers when young, but have a choice between becoming entrepreneurs or remaining workers when old. Imperfections in the credit market give rise to rents in entrepreneurial activities involving capital. These rents motivate poor young agents to work hard and save to overcome the borrowing constraints. With a labour market that is subject to moral hazard, the increased effort raises social welfare. Policies that reduce credit market imperfections, or redistribute income, may reduce welfare by dampening this effect.
Procurement Mechanism Design in a Two-Echelon Inventory System with Price-Sensitive Demand

This paper studies a buyer's procurement strategies in a two-stage supply chain with price-sensitive demand. The buyer procures a product from a supplier and then sells to the marketplace. Market demand is stochastic and depends on the buyer's selling price. The supplier's production cost is private information, and the buyer only knows the distribution of the cost. Both the buyer and the supplier can hold inventories to improve service, and a periodic-review inventory system is considered. The buyer takes two attributes into consideration when designing the procurement mechanism: quantity attribute (i.e., the total purchase quantity) and service-level attribute (i.e., the supplier's delivery performance). We first identify the optimal procurement mechanism for the buyer, which consists of a nonlinear menu of contracts for each of the two attributes. It can be shown that the optimal mechanism induces both a lower market demand and a lower service level compared to the supply chain optimum. In view of the complexity of the optimal mechanism, we proceed to search for simpler mechanisms that perform well for the buyer. We find that the above two attributes have different implications for procurement mechanism design: The value of using complex contract terms is generally negligible for the service-level attribute, whereas it can be highly valuable for the quantity attribute. In particular, we demonstrate that a fixed service-level contract, which consists of a target service level and a price-quantity menu, yields nearly optimal profit for the buyer. Additionally, the price-quantity menu is essentially a quantity discount scheme widely observed in practice.
Consumption smoothing? Livestock, insurance and drought in rural Burkina Faso

Abstract This paper explores the extent of consumption smoothing between 1981 and 1985 in rural Burkina Faso. In particular, we examine the extent to which livestock, grain storage and inter-household transfers are used to smooth consumption against income risk. The survey coincided with a period of severe drought, so the results provide direct evidence on the effectiveness of these various insurance mechanisms when they are the most needed. We find evidence of little consumption smoothing. In particular, there is almost no risk sharing, and households rely almost exclusively on self-insurance in the form of adjustments to grain stocks to smooth out consumption. The outcome, however, is far from complete smoothing. Hence the main risk-coping strategies which are hypothesized in the literature (risk sharing and the use of assets as buffer stocks) were not effective during the survey period.
Topological Nematic States and Non-Abelian Lattice Dislocations

Restricting the motion of electrons from the continuous in an electron gas to discrete hopping on a lattice leads to the emergence of new topologically ordered states that are related to fractional quantum Hall states.
Extraordinary Measures: Protesting Rule of Law Violations After Bush v. Gore

More than any case in recent history, the Court's decision in Bush v. Gore was intitally challenged as a violation of Rule of Law norms. Yet much of the scholarship that has subsequently analyzed the opinion has served more to normalize it than to underscore its departures. Moreover, almost none of this work has encouraged scholars to move beyond the conventions of legal commentary to protest its lawlessness. This article seeks to understand this disjuncture, and to explore its sources, both in scholarly understandings of the Rule of Law and in related, but distinct conceptions of the legal academic role. Drawing on a common thread of these arguments - one that describes rule- or law-making as a form of social practice - it argues that this tendency in recent scholarly work is misconceived. The article argues that the most compelling "social practice" versions of the Rule of Law suggest that law professors should move beyond their traditional boundaries of the academic role to resist a breach of this magnitude, and it identifies some of the means by which legal academics might usefully have responded to the violation implicit in the Court's ruling.
The term structure and inflation uncertainty

Abstract To assess the importance of inflation risk for nominal Treasury yields, a novel quadratic term structure model with time-varying inflation risk is estimated using survey-based inflation uncertainty. The resulting yield decomposition captures very diverse macroeconomic dynamics of inflation and real risk premiums (large and positive during the 1980s but small and negative post-2008) and generates sensible high-frequency estimates of expected inflation and real short rates over a long sample. The explicit link between the model-implied factors and macro fundamentals reveals that short- but not long-run fluctuations are unspanned by yields, consistent with an interest rate policy unresponsive to transient inflation shocks.
Kinship Foster Care: Implications of Behavioral Biology Research

Public child welfare agencies have come to rely heavily on kin to serve as foster parents.1 In some urban counties more than half of the children in foster care live with kin.2 In securing this high rate of kin placement, agency caseworkers must necessarily consider and choose among different types of kin. In the process, caseworkers may favor certain kin (e.g., grandmothers). Similarly, legislators may favor certain kin in child welfare proceedings. For example, the Pennsylvania legislature is considering a “grandparents rights bill” that would give grandparents formal standing as a party in child welfare custody matters.3 This bill would place grandparents in a superior legal position in relation to other relatives of a child subject to child dependency proceedings.4 With their superior political power, grandparents can press for this
Egg freezing, stratified reproduction and the logic of not

This commentary examines social and political implications of social egg freezing in a market that is stratified, globalized, and part of a larger bioeconomy. John Robertson’s article and public discourse prompted by Facebook and Apple’s ‘corporate egg freezing’ benefits provide touchstones for interrogating social and industry practices that embrace making reproductive capacity marketable. Supply of the cells and bodies necessary for assisted reproductive technology use depends on market thinking and structural inequality. What the industry produces are carefully calibrated social-political distances between participants in egg freezing and banking, as well as ‘third party reproduction.’
The information content of the sentiment index

The widely-used Baker and Wurgler (2006) sentiment index is strongly correlated with business cycle variables, especially the short interest rate and Lee (2011) liquidity risk factor. The power of the sentiment index to predict cross-sectional stock returns is mainly driven by its information content related to these business cycle variables. About 63% percent of the total variation in the investor sentiment index can be explained by well-known, contemporaneous risk/business cycle variables. We decompose the widely used investor sentiment index into two components: one related to standard risk/business cycle variables and the other unrelated to those variables. We show that the power of the sentiment index to predict cross-sectional stock returns is mainly driven by the risk/business cycle component, while the residual component has little significance in predicting cross-sectional stock returns.
Noncitizens’ Remedies Lost?:Accountability for Overreaching in Immigration Enforcement

Remedies for government overreaching in immigration cases have always embodied a dilemma. On the one hand, the government sometimes acts excessively, failing to provide allegedly removable noncitizens with appropriate process,1 using excessive force in arrests,2 or detaining noncitizens too long or under poor conditions.3 On the other hand, particularly since the government has legitimate concerns about both immigration violations and the threat of terrorism from noncitizens, overly broad or expansive remedies may chill government efforts and leave the nation vulnerable.4 While such competing concerns exist in any area involving suits against government officials,5
Cigarette Smokers as Job Risk Takers

Using a large data set, the authors find that smokers select riskier jobs, but receive lower total wage compensation for risk than do nonsmokers. This finding is inconsistent with conventional models of compensating differentials. The authors develop a model in which worker risk preferences and job safety performance lead to smokers facing a flatter market offer curve than nonsmokers. The empirical results support the theoretical model. Smokers are injured more often controlling for their job's objective risk and are paid less for these risks of injury. Smokers and nonsmokers, in effect, are segmented labor market groups with different preferences and different market offer curves.
Fraud Is Now Legal in Texas (For Some People)

Three intermediate appellate courts in Texas have held that corporate actors—directors, officers, managers, shareholders, and probably common employees and agents—are immune from personal liability for fraud that they themselves commit as long as their deceit relates to or arises from a contractual obligation of the corporation. Similar actors in limited liability companies also enjoy immunity. These courts do not require that the business entities themselves be liable for the fraud. When the entities are not liable, these new holdings leave fraud victims no remedy at all, even if a jury would find fraud. One (or maybe two) Texas appellate courts have held otherwise. The Supreme Court of Texas will probably decide the issue, and one justice has already signed on. To date, these decisions have only been noticed in print by a few practicing attorneys. No commentator has questioned them. But the decisions are wrong. These courts claim to be following a statute, but the statute does not support the courts’ analysis. Nor does the statute’s legislative history. Surprising (and probably unnoticed) results strongly suggest the legislature never intended this reading. And what rationale could justify it? Fraud is the economic equivalent of theft. Practitioner comments on the decisions suggest that the cost of litigating fraud is too high. Texas’s reputation for pro-business policies might suggest this move is just helpful de-regulation, but it is not. Policing fraud is the only way to make markets safe for freedom of contract, and litigating fraud claims is the courts’ role. These decisions should be abandoned before they become the law in all of Texas and elsewhere.
The Relationship of Participatory Democracy to Participatory Law Formation

While the traditional doctrinal formulation of customary international law (CIL) has focused exclusively on state practice and opinio juris, in the modern age, it is undeniable that individuals and non-state collectives of individuals are increasingly becoming relevant to this process. It is thus useful to analyze individual participation based on the model of participatory democracy, and also in contrast to representative democracy. By doing so, the nuanced relationship between participatory law formation and democratic participation in lawmaking is brought into relief. In light of larger modern trends within international law, the participation of individuals in law formation requires further examination and theorization to harness and maximize its democratic promise and minimize its potential tendencies toward elitism and secrecy.
“As a Father Shows Compassion for His Children”: Ancient and Contemporary Perspectives on Judicial Empathy

Conventional wisdom holds that judges ought to be emotionless. Occasional counterclaims, however, have posited compassion as an essential element of judicial wisdom. When compassion is thus privileged, it is understood as uniquely parental.We use as our lens two examples, one ancient and one modern: the disqualification, in the Babylonian Talmud, of childless men from judging capital cases on the ground that they are “devoid of paternal tenderness,” and Judge Julian Mack’s vision of the early 20th century juvenile court judge as a “wise and merciful father.” In both narratives judges are asked to have the capacity for empathy, which is believed to spark compassion, which in turn is predicted to manifest in mercy. In neither narrative, however, is this empathic arc seen as critical for judging in the ordinary case. A contemporary study showing the jurisprudential impact of fathering daughters represents a modern iteration of the judge-as-caring-parent meme.
Leadership Skills and Wages

Controlling for cognitive skills, we find that men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults. The pure leadership‐wage effect varies, depending on definitions and time period, from 4% to 33%. This effect is not an artifact of measurement error in cognitive skills or differences in a wide array of other physical or psychological traits. High school leaders are more likely to occupy managerial occupations as adults, and leadership skills command a higher wage premium within managerial occupations than elsewhere. Finally, it appears that leadership skills may be fostered by exposure to high school leadership opportunities.
Learning from Protein Structure with Geometric Vector Perceptrons

Learning on 3D structures of large biomolecules is emerging as a distinct area in machine learning, but there has yet to emerge a unifying network architecture that simultaneously leverages the geometric and relational aspects of the problem domain. To address this gap, we introduce geometric vector perceptrons, which extend standard dense layers to operate on collections of Euclidean vectors. Graph neural networks equipped with such layers are able to perform both geometric and relational reasoning on efficient representations of macromolecules. We demonstrate our approach on two important problems in learning from protein structure: model quality assessment and computational protein design. Our approach improves over existing classes of architectures on both problems, including state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and graph neural networks.