cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Between Law and Religion: Procedural Challenges to Religious Arbitration Awards

This Essay presented at the Sharia and Halakha in America Conference explores the unique status of religious law as a hybrid concept that simultaneously retains the characteristics of both law and religion. To do so, the Article considers as a case study how courts should evaluate procedural challenges to religious arbitration awards. To respond to such challenges, courts must treat religious law as law when defining the contractually adopted religious procedural rules and treat religious law as religion when reviewing precisely what the religious procedural rules require. On this account, constitutional and arbitration doctrine combine to insulate religious arbitration awards from judicial even on procedural grounds, leaving courts to confirm religious arbitration awards without knowing whether the arbitrators complied with the contractually required procedural safeguards. This outcome - emblematic of the Janus-faced nature of religious law - gives us good reason to reevaluate how U.S. law treats religious law, encouraging us to de-mystify religious law by seeing it more like law and less like religion.
The Risk and Return from Factors

The ability to identify which factors best capture systematic return covariation is central to applications of multifactor pricing models. This paper uses a common data set to evaluate the performance of various proposed factors in capturing return comovements. Factors as? sociated with the market, size, past return, book-to-market, and dividend yield help explain return comovement on an out-of-sample basis (although they are not necessarily associated with large premiums in average returns). Except for the default premium and the term pre? mium, macroeconomic factors perform poorly. We document regularities in the behavior of the more important factors, and confirm their influence in the Japanese and U.K. markets as well. I. Introduction This paper seeks to identify which factors are important for driving the com? mon variation in stock returns. We evaluate all the major factors that have been suggested in the existing empirical literature. Unlike earlier research that has been concerned with the determinants of expected returns, however, our main interest lies more in specifying the sources of return covariation regardless of whether they are priced or not. The identification of the sources of comovement and, hence, sources of portfolio risk, is an important issue for theoretical and applied reasons.
Explorations in monetary history: A survey of the literature

Abstract Monetary economists have long been interested in economic history as a laboratory for the testing of theory. This paper surveys recent work in monetary history within the context of the modern quantity theory of money and the new classical macroeconomics. Topics surveyed include the development of historical monetary statistics and the determinants of money supply and money demand; historical uses of Granger-Sims causality tests of the relationships between money, prices, and output; historical studies of the secular behavior of velocity; the Great Depression; financial crises; historical evidence for the long-run and short-run neutrality of money; and domestic and international aspects of monetary standards. Each topic surveyed concludes with an evaluation and an agenda for future research.
Long‐term database of Beasley Lake Watershed with 25 years of agricultural conservation practices

Beasley Lake Watershed is an agriculturally influenced drainage basin in western Mississippi that has been intensively studied for 25 years. As part of the USDA Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), the watershed has archived hydrology, precipitation, and water quality data in order to measure the effects of multiple USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service conservation practices on lake water quality. The long-term database is available to researchers using a web-based application, Sustaining the Earth’s Watersheds, Agricultural Research Data System (STEWARDS). STEWARDS is a GIS-based data retrieval application that encompasses spatial and temporal data collected from multiple sites within the watershed. This data note describes information located in the STEWARDS Beasley Lake Watershed database, including hydrology, precipitation, and water quality data. This information is valuable to researchers and agencies beyond the USDA as an available and useful database to improve the understanding of how land-use practices affect the water quality of shallow lake systems.
Property rights, production technology, and deforestation: cocoa in Cameroon

In this article, we use a vintage-capital model with risk of eviction to assess cocoa farmers' response to changes in their tenure security and to the introduction of a new, faster-maturing cocoa variety. The model is calibrated with data from Cameroon in calendar year 2000, and then used to simulate the effects of institutional and technical change on farmer welfare and deforestation rates. Our findings can be summarized in three points. First, improved tenure security over cocoa fields increases farmers' consumption and welfare, but at the expense of more deforestation. Second, the introduction of new cocoa varieties with faster maturity and higher input response also unambiguously raises farmers' consumption and welfare. Doing so increases deforestation under insecure land tenure, but slows down deforestation under secure land tenure. Third, when introducing the two innovations together (more security and also new varieties), there is both an increase in welfare and a decline in deforestation. In sum, the availability of new cocoa cultivars calls for stronger tenure security, to accommodate investment in the new technology without increasing deforestation.
Precautionary Savings Motives and Tax Efficiency of Household Portfolios: An Empirical Analysis

Tax efficiency is the dominant consideration in theoretical portfolio models that allow for both taxable and tax-deferred accounts (TDAs). Investors are advised to locate higher-tax assets in their tax-deferred accounts, which in the Unites States commonly translates into holding bonds inside TDAs and holding equities outside. Yet, observed portfolio allocations are not tax efficient. This paper empirically evaluates the predictions of a recent model designed to bridge the existing gap by explicitly incorporating uninsurable labor income risk and limited accessibility of TDA assets in household decisions [Amromin, 2003]. Together, these elements create tension between household's desire to maintain tax efficient allocations and its concern over the need to make costly TDA withdrawals in the event of bad income draws. This leads some borrowing-constrained households facing labor income risk and TDA access penalties to forgo tax efficiency in favor of allocations that provide more liquidity in bad income states - an outcome labeled as precautionary portfolio choice. The empirical results based on household-level portfolio data from the Survey of Consumer Finances provide evidence that both the choice of whether to hold a tax efficient portfolio and the degree of portfolio tax inefficiency are related to the presence and severity of precautionary motives.
The Emerging Practice of Global Environmental Law

Since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, ecological pressures on our planet have grown more acute. Yet, modern environmental law has also continued to evolve and spread within international as well as among national legal systems. With the paths of international and national environmental law becoming increasingly intertwined over the years, international environmental legal norms and principles are now penetrating deeper into national legal systems, and environmental treaties are increasingly incorporating or referencing national legal norms and practices. The shifting legal landscape is also changing contemporary environmental law practice, creating greater needs for domestic environmental lawyers to be informed by international law and vice versa. This essay describes how domestic environmental law practice is increasingly informed by international legal norms, while the effective practice of international environmental law more and more requires enhanced awareness, and even understanding, of national environmental regulatory and governance systems. It illustrates these trends with the historical role and work of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of General Counsel.
Federal tax arrears in Russia Liquidity problems, federal redistribution or regional resistance?*

Three hypotheses about the nature of federal tax arrears in Russia in the second half of the 1990s are tested empirically. Tax arrears can be a result of: 1) liquidity problems in firms, 2) redistributive subsidies of the federal government, or 3) regional political resistance to federal tax collectors. Liquidity problems in firms explain a large part of the variation in tax arrears. Regional political resistance to federal tax collectors was also an important factor: For a given level of liquidity, federal arrears accumulated faster in regions where governors had a larger popular base, in regions with a better bargaining position vis-a-vis the centre, and in regions with governors in political opposition to the centre. We find that patterns of federal arrears are inconsistent with the redistributive politics premise that redistribution favours jurisdictions with 'closer races' for the incumbent in the national elections. Variation in authorized tax deferrals can be explained in part by federal redistributive politics.
Inflation and the Stock Market:Understanding the "Fed Model"

The so-called Fed model postulates that the dividend or earnings yield on stocks should equal the yield on nominal Treasury bonds, or at least that the two should be highly correlated. In US data there is indeed a strikingly high time series correlation between the yield on nominal bonds and the dividend yield on equities. This positive correlation is often attributed to the fact that both bond and equity yields comove strongly and positively with expected inflation. Contrary to some of the extant literature, we show that this effect is consistent with modern asset pricing theory incorporating uncertainty about real growth prospects and habit-based risk aversion. In the US, high expected inflation has tended to coincide with periods of heightened uncertainty about real economic growth and unusually high risk aversion, both of which rationally raise equity yields.
The puzzle of delegated revenge

INTRODUCTION 1060 I. TRADITIONAL THEORIES AND THEIR FAILINGS 1063 A. The Ubiquity of Delegated Revenge 1063 B. The Failure of Standard Explanations Offered by Economics and Psychology 1065 1. Capturing Positive Externalities 1066 2. Avoiding Negative Externalities 1070 3. Procedural Justice 1073 C. Where the Instrumental Explanations Fail – Examples 1075 1. People Do Not Always Prefer the “Cheapest” Punisher...... 1076 2. People Are Not Indifferent Among State Punishers 1078 3. People Are Not Indifferent to the Purpose of the Offender’s Suffering 1081 II. AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF DELEGATED REVENGE 1086 A. Crime and Social Status 1086 B. Applying the Social Status Theory to Solve Puzzles of Delegated Revenge 1091 1. Methods of Execution 1092 2. Cultural Differences in Vigilantism and Delegation of Revenge 1094 3. Historical Differences in Agents of Revenge 1095 III. THE LIMITS OF DELEGATED REVENGE 1100 A. Crimes Where Victims Refuse to Delegate Fully 1100 B. Populations That Refuse to Delegate Fully 1105 CONCLUSION 1111
The S-U algorithm for missing data problems

We present a new Monte-Carlo method for finding the solution of an estimating equation that can be expressed as the expected value of a ‘full data’ estimating equation in which the expected value is with respect to the distribution of the missing data given the observed data. Equations such as these arise whenever the E-M algorithm can be used. The algorithm alternates between two steps: an S-step, in which the missing data are simulated, either from the conditional distribution described above or from a more convenient importance sampling distribution, and a U-step, in which parameters are updated using a closed-form expression that does not require a numerical maximization. We present two numerical examples to illustrate the method. Theoretical results are obtained establishing consistency and asymptotic normality of the approximate solution obtained by our method.
Multilateral tariff cooperation during the formation of customs unions

Abstract We study the implications of customs-union formation for multilateral tariff cooperation. We model cooperation in multilateral trade policy as self-enforcing, in that it involves balancing the current gains from deviating unilaterally from an agreed-upon trade policy against the future losses from forfeiting the benefits of multilateral cooperation that such a unilateral defection would imply. The early stages of the process of customs-union formation are shown to alter this dynamic incentive constraint in a way that leads to a temporary “honeymoon” for liberal multilateral trade policies. We find, however, that the harmony between customs unions and multilateral liberalization is temporary: eventually, as the full impact of the emerging customs union becomes felt, a less favorable balance between current and future conditions re-emerges, and the liberal multilateral policies of the honeymoon phase cannot be sustained.
A Theory of “Crying Wolf” : The Economics of Money Laundering Enforcement

The article shows how excessive reporting, called "crying wolf", can dilute the information value of reports and how more reports can mean less information. Excessive reporting is investigated by undertaking the first formal analysis of money laundering enforcement. Banks monitor transactions and report suspicious activity to government agencies, which use these reports to identify investigation targets. Banks face fines should they fail to report money laundering. However, excessive fines force banks to report transactions which are less suspicious. The empirical evidence is shown to be consistent with the model's predictions. The model is used to suggest implementable corrective policy measures, such as decreasing fines and introducing reporting fees. The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Inter-industry network structure and the cross-predictability of earnings and stock returns

We examine how the patterns of inter-industry trade flows impact the transfer of information and economic shocks. We provide evidence that the intensity of transfers depends on industries’ positions within the economy. In particular, some industries occupy central positions in the flow of trade, serving as hubs. Consistent with a diversification effect, we find that these industries’ returns depend relatively more on aggregate risks than do returns of noncentral industries. Analogously, we find that the accounting performance of central industries associates more strongly with macroeconomic measures than does the accounting performance of noncentral industries. Comparing central industries to noncentral ones, we find that the stock returns and accounting performance of central industries better predict the performance of industries linked to them. This suggests that shocks to central industries propagate more strongly than shocks to other industries. Our results highlight how industries’ positions within the economy affect the transfer of information and economic shocks.
Value Line and I/B/E/S Earnings Forecasts

Abstract This paper compares Value Line and Institutional Brokers Estimate System (I/B/E/S) analysts' earnings forecasts. Comparing the accuracy of forecasts of a single forecaster (Value Line) to consensus forecasts (I/B/E/S) offers a powerful test of the aggregation principle. Philbrick and Ricks [J. Acc. Res. 29 (1991) 397] conducted a similar study, but found no evidence that aggregation matters. Using more recent data, we reach different conclusions, finding that I/B/E/S earnings forecasts outperform Value Line significantly in terms of accuracy and as proxies for market expectations. I/B/E/S forecasting superiority is largely explained by its timing advantage and the aggregation principle. However, when we build an I/B/E/S consensus using forecasts from the I/B/E/S detail files of individual analyst forecasts, we find that some of its forecasting superiority remains after controlling for these advantages.
Policy Uncertainty and Corporate Investment

Using a news-based index of policy uncertainty, we document a strong negative relationship between firm-level capital investment and the aggregate level of uncertainty associated with future policy and regulatory outcomes. More importantly, we find evidence that the relation between policy uncertainty and capital investment is not uniform in the cross-section, being significantly stronger for firms with a higher degree of investment irreversibility and for firms that are more dependent on government spending. Our results lend empirical support to the notion that policy uncertainty can depress corporate investment by inducing precautionary delays due to investment irreversibility.
A swarm of Bs

New physics signals containing five or more b-tagged jets, but without T or leptons, could realistically be sitting within the current 8 TeV LHC data set without receiving meaningful constraints from any of the existing LHC searches at either ATLAS or CMS. This work provides several examples of simple, motivated models that yield final states containing many b-jets. To study the potential for uncovering new physics in these high b-jet multiplicity channels, this paper focuses on a natural supersymmetry scenario where each of the pair-produced stops decays to an on-shell chargino, which subsequently decays via an MFV-motivated, R-parity violating coupling. This gives rise to an eight-jet final state containing six b-quarks. Although no public measurements exist, estimates indicate that the standard model backgrounds in high b-jet multiplicity channels should be very small. To circumvent the background uncertainty, an asymmetric method is presented that utilizes two different techniques to conservatively exclude or to discover new physics in high b-jet multiplicity final states.
How the Nature of Product Differentiation Affects Procurement Competition

This article uses computational methods that reveal substantive differences among the equilibrium outcomes from three models of procurement competition: a recently developed model requiring numerical solution and two analytically tractable models that might naturally be considered suitable proxies. The models differ in what sellers know about the buyer's preferences for their products, and they yield substantially different prices and payoffs, different implications for institutional choice, surprising intensities of competition, and qualitatively different comparative statics. These findings caution against using the analytically convenient models when the newer model is empirically appropriate. Reinterpreting the models and results also provides new insights regarding price discrimination in oligopoly.
Secretaries of Pork? A New Theory of Distributive Public Policy

Scholars have focused attention toward congressional influence over distributive grant allocations, but they have less frequently examined the extent to which administrative agencies play a role in that process. We present a new theory of ideology-contingent executive decision making within a multiple-principals framework to explain the geographic distribution of policy benefits. Our theory is novel in that it locates interbranch ideological conflict and confluence at the center of bureaus’ allocational strategies. Discretionary Department of Labor (DOL) grants and Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from 1991 to 2002 are examined to provide evidence that agencies deliver more grants to senators with proximate ideologies. To measure bureaucratic ideology, we generate comparable ideology estimates for cabinet secretaries, presidents, and members of the U.S. Senate via an item-response model. Our findings suggest that ideological congruence between senators and DOL or DOD is associated with significantly ...
Concessional Amnesty and the Politics of Immigration Reforms

This paper establishes a political support model of immigration reforms. The analysis highlights the distinction between border enforcement and employer sanction measures in that the former can be more aptly characterized as an income transfer from employer to native labor interests, whereas the latter generates deadweight losses that are borne entirely by producers. We show that while amnesty may appear to run contrary to the original intent of the immigration reform, it may nevertheless facilitate rent capture by the politician by “wiping the slate clean” and reducing the deadweight loss of employer sanction measures.
Municipal Construction Spending: An Empirical Examination

Despite widespread concern and discussion, no consensus exists concerning the causes of the “infrastructure crisis” or its implications for the efficiency of government decision-making more generally. We investigate several models of the determination of local public capital expenditures. Using Euler equation methods, we cannot reject the hypothesis that construction spending is determined by unconstrained, forward looking municipal planning. Consistent with this result, the stochastic structure of resource flows is an important feature of the determination of construction spending. Only unanticipated changes in a community's resources alter its demand for structures, with an unanticipated increase of one dollar increasing current construction spending by about 5.6 cents.
A Theory of Hard and Soft Information

ABSTRACT: We study optimal disclosure via two competing communication channels: hard information whose value has been verified, and soft disclosures such as forecasts, unaudited statements, and pre...
Stereotyping Women, Individualizing Harassment: The Dignitary Paradigm of Sexual Harassment Law Between the Limits of Law and the Limits of Feminism

This article provides a thorough analysis of contemporary sexual harassment case law in Israel and presents the first systematic study of all reported court opinions on sexual harassment that have been issued following the enactment of The Prevention of Sexual Harassment Law in 1998, 222 opinions in all. The main goal of this research is to explore the manner in which courts of all instances "talk" about sexual harassment and conceptualize its harm. From a global perspective, Israel's sexual harassment law is particularly interesting and deserves a close analysis for two main reasons. First, it provides an intriguing example of an effort to use the law as an effective tool for social change. Sexual harassment legislation in Israel was inspired and promoted by feminist activists and academics, whose cooperation with members of Parliament facilitated the successful enactment of the law in 1998. Second, the rationales underlying the new legislation in Israel reflect contemporary doctrinal and normative challenges to sexual harassment law in the U.S. and in Europe. The feminist idea behind the Israeli legislation was to offer a new conceptualization of sexual harassment, compared to the American example. The goal was to carefully examine U.S. sexual harassment law, to identify its drawbacks and devise a new and better formulation for the Israeli context. One major implication of this feminist effort to improve the traditional legal framework of sexual harassment law was the re-conceptualization of the phenomenon as a dignitary harm in addition to its discriminatory aspects. Taking in consideration these unique aspects of the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Law in Israel, this article explores the various consequences of the Law's dignitary paradigm and examines whether the new law has fulfilled its promise in promoting a more progressive understanding of sexual harassment, and what lessons can be learned form this contemporary feminist effort to correct some of the major drawbacks of American sexual harassment doctrine.
The Importance of Being Empirical

Legal scholarship is becoming increasingly empirical. Although empirical methodologies gain important influence within the legal academy, their application in legal research remains underdeveloped. This paper surveys and analyzes the state of empirical legal scholarship and explores possible influences on its production. The paper advances a normative argument for increased empirical legal scholarship.
Privatization, Prisons, Democracy, and Human Rights: The Need to Extend the Province of Administrative Law

Administrative law has an important role to play when it comes to providing democratic forums for deliberation and decisionmaking on a wide range of issues. In this paper, I will argue that domestic administrative law potentially offers a means for addressing human rights problems arising from privatization, particularly privatization in the United States dealing with prisons. As this paper will argue, creating opportunities for citizen involvement in what otherwise might be thought of as private decisionmaking processes may help prevent human rights problems before they occur. At a minimum, such an approach can create the forums and information necessary for meaningful and timely politics to develop around issues that, once privatized, can all too easily fall from public view. To make these arguments, this paper will focus exclusively on U.S. law as a case study of these issues.
Iterative Graph Cuts for Image Segmentation with a Nonlinear Statistical Shape Prior

Shape-based regularization has proven to be a useful method for delineating objects within noisy images where one has prior knowledge of the shape of the targeted object. When a collection of possible shapes is available, the specification of a shape prior using kernel density estimation is a natural technique. Unfortunately, energy functionals arising from kernel density estimation are of a form that makes them impossible to directly minimize using efficient optimization algorithms such as graph cuts. Our main contribution is to show how one may recast the energy functional into a form that is minimizable iteratively and efficiently using graph cuts.
Would Multilateral Trade Reform Benefit Sub-Saharan Africans

This paper examines whether the Sub-Saharan African economies could gain from multilateral trade reform in the presence of trade preferences. The World Bank's LINKAGE model of the global economy is employed to examine the impact first of current trade barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible outcomes from the WTO's Doha round. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise trade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa proportionately more than in other developing countries or in high-income countries, despite a terms of trade loss in parts of the region. Farm employment and output, the real value of agricultural and food exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes would all rise in the region, thereby alleviating poverty. A Doha partial liberalization of both agricultural and nonagricultural trade could significantly benefit the region.
Weighted genomic distance can hardly impose a bound on the proportion of transpositions

Genomic distance between two genomes, i.e., the smallest number of genome rearrangements required to transform one genome into the other, is often used as a measure of evolutionary closeness of the genomes in comparative genomics studies. However, in models that include rearrangements of significantly different "power" such as reversals (that are "weak" and most frequent rearrangements) and transpositions (that are more "powerful" but rare), the genomic distance typically corresponds to a transformation with a large proportion of transpositions, which is not biologically adequate. Weighted genomic distance is a traditional approach to bounding the proportion of transpositions by assigning them a relative weight α > 1. A number of previous studies addressed the problem of computing weighted genomic distance with α ≤ 2. Employing the model of multi-break rearrangements on circular genomes, that captures both reversals (modelled as 2-breaks) and transpositions (modelled as 3-breaks), we prove that for α ∈ (1, 2), a minimumweight transformation may entirely consist of transpositions, implying that the corresponding weighted genomic distance does not actually achieve its purpose of bounding the proportion of transpositions. We further prove that for α ∈ (1, 2), the minimum-weight transformations do not depend on a particular choice of a from this interval. We give a complete characterization of such transformations and show that they coincide with the transformations that at the same time have the shortest length and make the smallest number of breakages in the genomes. Our results also provide a theoretical foundation for the empirical observation that for α < 2, transpositions are favored over reversals in the minimum-weight transformations.
Radion Potential and Brane Dynamics

We examine the cosmology of Randall–Sundrum model in a dynamic setting where scalar fields are present in the bulk as well as the branes. This generates a mechanism similar to that of Goldberger–Wise for radion stabilization and the recovery of late-time cosmology features on the branes. Due to the induced radion dynamics, the inflating branes roll towards the minimum of the radion potential, thereby exiting inflation and reheating the universe. In the slow roll part of the potential, the TeV branes have maximum inflation rate and energy as their coupling to the radion and bulk modes have minimum suppression. Hence, when rolling down the steep end of the potential towards the stable point, the radion field (which appears as the inflaton of the effective 4-D theory in the branes) decays very fast and reheats the universe. This process results in a decrease of the brane's canonical vacuum energy, Λ4. However, at the minimum of the potential Λ4 is small but not necessarily zero and the fine-tuning issue remains. Density perturbation constraints introduce an upper bound on Λ4. Due to the large radion mass and strong suppression to the bulk modes, moduli problems and bulk reheating do not occur. The reheat temperature and a sufficient number of e-folding constraints for the brane-universe are also satisfied. The model therefore recovers the radiation dominated FRW universe.
A separation logic for concurrent randomized programs

We present Polaris, a concurrent separation logic with support for probabilistic reasoning. As part of our logic, we extend the idea of coupling, which underlies recent work on probabilistic relational logics, to the setting of programs with both probabilistic and non-deterministic choice. To demonstrate Polaris, we verify a variant of a randomized concurrent counter algorithm and a two-level concurrent skip list. All of our results have been mechanized in Coq.
Costly external financing, investment timing, and investment-cash flow sensitivity ☆

Abstract This paper examines the effects of costly external financing on the optimal timing of a firm's investment. By altering the optimal investment timing, costly financing affects current investment and the sensitivity of investment to internal cash flow. Importantly, the relation between the cost of external funds and investment–cash flow sensitivity is non-monotonic. Investment–cash flow sensitivity is decreasing in the cost of external financing when it is relatively low and is increasing in the financing cost when it is high. Empirical tests examining investment–cash flow sensitivities within groups of firms classified by proxies for their costs of external funds provide evidence consistent with the model. The model and the empirical results complement recent studies by Cleary, Povel and Raith [Cleary, S., Povel, P. and Raith, M., 2007. The U-shaped investment curve: theory and evidence, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 42, 1–39.] and Almeida and Campello [Almeida, H. and Campello, M., in press, Financial constraints, asset tangibility and corporate investment, Review of Financial Studies.] that show a non-monotonic relation between firms' investment and the availability of internal funds.
The History of the Modern Class Action, Part I: Sturm Und Drang, 1953–1980

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent and intensive engagement with class action doctrine has changed the device for claim aggregation significantly. The first era in the history of the modern class action, which began with the revision of Rule 23 in the 1950s and 1960s, may be ending. If so, the class action’s remarkable story deserves telling. This Article provides the first chapter, explaining how class action doctrine coalesced just moments before the great social and political strife of the 1960s, provoked a heated political war within a couple of years of its emergence, and finally stabilized by the end of the 1970s.After telling the story of the revised Rule 23’s origins, I describe the emergence of the fiery class action politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Combatants clashed over two competing conceptions of the new device. Advocates for plaintiffs’ interests championed a “regulatory conception” of Rule 23: Courts and lawmakers, they insisted, should treat the class action as a mechanism designed to boost the regulatory force of the substantive law. Decision-makers should apply Rule 23 flexibly, to recognize that the class action played a key role in new regulatory strategies pursued in the 1970s. Corporate interests and their allies countered with an “adjectival conception” of the class action, or an understanding of the device that conceived of it as a joinder rule like any other. They argued that courts should limit the class action strictly, lest a mere procedural rule significantly distort the role that civil litigation properly played in American government.The clash between these conceptions of Rule 23 offers a way to understand doctrinal evolution during the first chapter of the device’s modern history. Congress and federal rulemakers were unable to resolve the conflict between the regulatory and adjectival conceptions. The federal courts, however, did so successfully. Using a pragmatic balancing strategy in each substantive area affected by class actions, the federal courts preserved Rule 23’s regulatory force while insisting that class litigation not deviate too far from more traditional models of civil adjudication. This strategy stabilized class action doctrine by the end of the 1970s, laying a foundation for far more adventurous uses of the device in the 1980s and 1990s.
Will Law Firms Go Public

Law in the United States is a big business and big law firms are a global business. Currently, under rules of the American Bar Association (ABA) and most states law, firms are not allowed either to include non-lawyers as partners or accept equity investments from non-lawyers. This Article will argue that (even if law firms retain the form of partnerships) they eventually will accept investments from third parties, and possibly even go public, but this development could lead to a loss of professionalism, as it has with other industries, and could also lead to the end of self-regulation. Among the matters discussed are: legal ethics rules regarding law firm organization and the work of the ABA Ethics Commission; the changes to the regulation of lawyers in the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere; and litigation attacking current ethics rules regarding outside investments in law firms. Also, this Article will consider the evolution of other industries, and in particular investment banking firms, from closely held partnerships to large public companies, and will speculate about the future of the legal profession.
Measuring R&D curtailment among short-horizon CEOs

Abstract I review evidence produced by prior literature on CEO horizon problems and show that prior empirical findings are correlated with the research design employed. I find that evidence of R&D curtailment by CEOs as they approach retirement stems predominantly from cross-sectional correlations between CEO age or tenure and R&D spending. Using a broad sample of CEOs of S&P 1500 firms, I identify two factors that confound the cross-sectional relationship of firm R&D spending on CEO age or tenure which can lead to spurious inferences regarding the CEO horizon problem. I find that tracking R&D spending by the same CEOs over time produces no evidence of R&D curtailment. These results have research design implications for future researchers investigating the impact of shortened CEO career horizons on investment myopia.
The Agency Problems of Institutional Investors

Financial economics and corporate governance have long focused on the agency problems between corporate managers and shareholders that result from the dispersion of ownership in large publicly traded corporations. In this paper, we focus on how the rise of institutional investors over the past several decades has transformed the corporate landscape and, in turn, the governance problems of the modern corporation. The rise of institutional investors has led to increased concentration of equity ownership, with most public corporations now having a substantial proportion of their shares held by a small number of institutional investors. At the same time, these institutions are controlled by investment managers, which have their own agency problems vis-a-vis their own beneficial investors. We develop an analytical framework for understanding the agency problems of institutional investors, and apply it to examine the agency problems and behavior of several key types of investment managers, including those that manage mutual funds—both index funds and actively managed funds—and activist hedge funds. We show that index funds have especially poor incentives to engage in stewardship activities that could improve governance and increase value. Activist hedge funds have substantially better incentives than managers of index funds or active mutual funds. While their activities may partially compensate, we show that they do not provide a complete solution for the agency problems of other institutional investors.
Finite generation of extensions of associated graded rings along a valuation

In this paper we consider the question of when the associated graded ring along a valuation, ${\rm gr}_{\nu^*}(S)$, is a finite ${\rm gr}_{\nu^*}(R)$-module, where $S$ is a normal local ring which lies over a normal local ring $R$ and $\nu^*$ is a valuation of the quotient field of $S$ which dominates $S$. We obtain a very general result in equicharacteristic zero in Theorem 1.5. We also obtain general results for unramified extensions of excellent local rings in Proposition 1.7.
Why an economic core: domestic transport costs

What determines the spatial distribution of economic activity? And why is economic activity sometimes "lumpy", distributed in a core-periphery pattern in some countries? This paper uses new sub regional data on the spatial distribution of economic activity for a large cross section of countries, as well as information on roads, rails and surface topography to help understand the role of domestic transport costs in shaping economic geography. The evidence suggests a significant role for physical geography and transport costs in determining the location of economic activity. Countries with rougher surfaces have less developed road and rail transport networks, and greater spatial concentration of economic activity.
"Rethinking" Embryo Disposition Upon Divorce

Since 1992, when the Tennessee Supreme Court first confronted the issue in Davis v. Davis, courts have applied three different methods of analysis in disposing of frozen embryos upon divorce: a contractual approach, a contemporaneous mutual consent approach, and a balancing approach. Many view these approaches as conflicted. But in fact, with the exception of the right of a progenitor to change his or her mind as to disposition, the approaches taken by courts are quite consistent and offer a very workable continuum of analysis when parties have not unambiguously expressed their intent for disposition upon divorce. This continuum accommodates autonomous decision-making by the progenitors, balances individual interests, and respects the policies of the state.This article proposes that state legislatures should mandate that parties participating in assisted reproductive technologies expressly provide for disposition upon the contingency of divorce. Such a mandate will provide predictability for the progenitors and the fertility clinics, and will promote decision-making autonomy to parties who agree to participate in the assisted reproductive process. With respect to the right of a progenitor to change his or her mind as to disposition, the parameters of the framework set out in Davis must be more narrowly defined. Specifically, courts should adhere to the strict contractual model in cases in which the parties have expressly and unambiguously stated their intent for disposition upon divorce. In cases in which couples have not reached such agreement, the court should allow a party to determine his or her intent upon the contingency of divorce and provide for contemporaneous mutual consent to resolve disposition. Only upon the absence of an original agreement, or conflict between the parties as a result of the contingency of a divorce that was not contemplated in the original agreement, should the court balance the parties’ interests to determine disposition.
INFLATION RISK AND CAPITAL MARKET EQUILIBRIUM

This paper investigates the effect of inflation uncertainty on the portfolio behavior of households and the equilibrium structure of capitol market rates. The principal findings regarding portfolio behavior are: (1.) In the presence of inflation uncertainty, households will have an inflation-hedging demand for assets other than riskless nominal bonds, which will be directly proportional to the covariance between the rate of inflation and the nominal rates of return on these other assets. (2.) An asset is a perfect inflation hedge if and only if its nominal return is perfectly correlated with the rate of inflation. The principal findings regarding capital market rates are: (1.) The equilibrium real yield spread between any risky security and riskless nominal bonds is directly proportional to the difference between the covariance of the security's nominal rate of return with the market portfolio and its covariance with the rate of inflation. (2.) As long as the net supply of monetary assets in the economy is greater than zero, an increase in inflation uncertainty will lower the risk premia on all real assets. (3.) A preliminary empirical test of the theory using rates of return on common stocks, long-term bonds, real estate and commodity futures contracts yields mixed results. The risk premia on long-term bonds and futures have the "wrong" signs.
The reverberating risk of long-term care.

The Fiftieth Anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid offers an opportunity to reflect on how American social policy has conceived of the problem of long-term care. In this essay, based on a longer forthcoming article, I argue that current policies adopt too narrow a conception of long-term care risk, by focusing on the effect of serious illness and disability on people who need care and not on the friends and family who often provide it. I propose a more complete view of long-term care risk that acknowledges how illness and disability reverberates through communities, posing insecurity for people beyond those in need of care.
Birds do it. Bees do it. So why not single women and lesbians

Infertile couples have come to take assisted reproductive technologies (ART) for granted. An increasing number of single women and lesbian couples also desire to have children and turn to ART, especially donor insemination, to fulfill this desire. While most married couples find that access to ART is limited primarily by the ability to pay, for single women and lesbian couples, the story may be much different. In the United States, they may find that doctors and infertility clinics view their desires as immoral and refuse to accept them as patients, although other doctors and clinics readily accept them. In most other countries, however, it is against the law for single women and lesbian couples to make use of ART, including donor insemination. In this paper I will argue that marital status and sexual orientation should not serve as a barrier to accessing the world of reproductive medicine. I will base this conclusion on two arguments. First, that justice requires that we treat like cases alike. Just as we would not accept or reject patients for cardiac rehabilitation programs based on factors such as a history of poor eating habits, so too we should not look at nonmedical factors such as marital status when deciding whether to treat infertility. For the second justification for the conclusion of equal access to ART, I will examine the concept of the family. I will argue that it is morally acceptable for single women and lesbian couples to have children and to head families.
Techniques and Limits of Legal Reasoning in Shari'a Today

This article addresses a premodern Islamic legal heuristic that delineates the extent to which a given legal rule regards public or private interest, or even both. The legal heuristic in expressed in premodern sources as the huquq Allah and the huquq al-‘ibad, or the ‘rights of God’ and the ‘rights of individuals,’ respectively. The article also presents a case-study of the contemporary Islamic family law regime applies in Mindanao, the southern region of The Philippines, namely the Code of Muslim Personal Law put into effect under the Marcos regime. Through an analysis of the premodern legal tradition and an appreciation of the contemporary context of Mindanao, the article utilizes the premodern legal heuristic to reflect upon the dynamics of legal ordering and legal pluralism in the modern nation state.
Unpacking Adaptation: The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong

In 1994, after a year of intense activism by indigenous women and their urban supporters, indigenous women in the New Territories of Hong Kong were legally allowed to inherit land for the first time. In pushing for legislative change, the female inheritance movement adopted key ideas-gender equality, human rights and a critique of patriarchy-from a global vocabulary of feminism and human rights. This article examines this rights frame to understand how, if at all, activists modified international conceptions of discrimination and rights to fit Hong Kong. Overall, the ideology was not fundamentally altered or adapted, but indigenized by local activists through the use of local symbols. More deep-rooted change was not necessary for two reasons: First, in the pre-handover moment, rights arguments derived political currency from their association with an international community. Also, critical movement participants, here termed translators, helped encompass the indigenous women's individual kinship grievances within a broader movement based on rights.