cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Kernel Spectral Curvature Clustering (KSCC)

Multi-manifold modeling is increasingly used in segmentation and data representation tasks in computer vision and related fields. While the general problem, modeling data by mixtures of manifolds, is very challenging, several approaches exist for modeling data by mixtures of affine subspaces (which is often referred to as hybrid linear modeling). We translate some important instances of multi-manifold modeling to hybrid linear modeling in embedded spaces, without explicitly performing the embedding but applying the kernel trick. The resulting algorithm, Kernel Spectral Curvature Clustering, uses kernels at two levels - both as an implicit embedding method to linearize non-flat manifolds and as a principled method to convert a multi-way affinity problem into a spectral clustering one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by comparing it with other state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic data and a real-world problem of segmenting multiple motions from two perspective camera views.
Deep Parallel MRI Reconstruction Network Without Coil Sensitivities

We propose a novel deep neural network architecture by mapping the robust proximal gradient scheme for fast image reconstruction in parallel MRI (pMRI) with regularization function trained from data. The proposed network learns to adaptively combine the multi-coil images from incomplete pMRI data into a single image with homogeneous contrast, which is then passed to a nonlinear encoder to efficiently extract sparse features of the image. Unlike most of existing deep image reconstruction networks, our network does not require knowledge of sensitivity maps, which can be difficult to estimate accurately, and have been a major bottleneck of image reconstruction in real-world pMRI applications. The experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of our method on a variety of pMRI imaging data sets.
Deformation-Aware 3D Model Embedding and Retrieval

We introduce a new problem of retrieving 3D models that are deformable to a given query shape and present a novel deep deformation-aware embedding to solve this retrieval task. 3D model retrieval is a fundamental operation for recovering a clean and complete 3D model from a noisy and partial 3D scan. However, given a finite collection of 3D shapes, even the closest model to a query may not be satisfactory. This motivates us to apply 3D model deformation techniques to adapt the retrieved model so as to better fit the query. Yet, certain restrictions are enforced in most 3D deformation techniques to preserve important features of the original model that prevent a perfect fitting of the deformed model to the query. This gap between the deformed model and the query induces asymmetric relationships among the models, which cannot be handled by typical metric learning techniques. Thus, to retrieve the best models for fitting, we propose a novel deep embedding approach that learns the asymmetric relationships by leveraging location-dependent egocentric distance fields. We also propose two strategies for training the embedding network. We demonstrate that both of these approaches outperform other baselines in our experiments with both synthetic and real data. Our project page can be found at deformscan2cad.github.io.
Hard negative examples are hard, but useful

Triplet loss is an extremely common approach to distance metric learning. Representations of images from the same class are optimized to be mapped closer together in an embedding space than representations of images from different classes. Much work on triplet losses focuses on selecting the most useful triplets of images to consider, with strategies that select dissimilar examples from the same class or similar examples from different classes. The consensus of previous research is that optimizing with the hardest negative examples leads to bad training behavior. That’s a problem – these hardest negatives are literally the cases where the distance metric fails to capture semantic similarity. In this paper, we characterize the space of triplets and derive why hard negatives make triplet loss training fail. We offer a simple fix to the loss function and show that, with this fix, optimizing with hard negative examples becomes feasible. This leads to more generalizable features, and image retrieval results that outperform state of the art for datasets with high intra-class variance. Code is available at: https://github.com/littleredxh/HardNegative.git
Corporate stakeholders, corporate valuation and ESG

In addition to explicit contracts, corporations issue their stakeholders implicit claims, including fair treatment of employees and the promise of continuing service to customers. Corporate value is created by selling these implicit claims for more than it costs to honour them. Recently, a new class of non‐investor stakeholders, related to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, has arisen. Although many ESG advocates stress their role in creating shareholder value, they do not explain how this value creation occurs. This paper shows that implicit claims provide a critical link that ties non‐investor stakeholders and ESG to shareholder value, both its creation and its possible destruction.
A Primer in BERTology: What We Know About How BERT Works

Transformer-based models have pushed state of the art in many areas of NLP, but our understanding of what is behind their success is still limited. This paper is the first survey of over 150 studies of the popular BERT model. We review the current state of knowledge about how BERT works, what kind of information it learns and how it is represented, common modifications to its training objectives and architecture, the overparameterization issue and approaches to compression. We then outline directions for future research.
Solving Linear Programs in the Current Matrix Multiplication Time

This article shows how to solve linear programs of the form minAx=b,x≥ 0 c⊤ x with n variables in time O*((nω+n2.5−α/2+n2+1/6) log (n/δ)), where ω is the exponent of matrix multiplication, α is the dual exponent of matrix multiplication, and δ is the relative accuracy. For the current value of ω δ 2.37 and α δ 0.31, our algorithm takes O*(nω log (n/δ)) time. When ω = 2, our algorithm takes O*(n2+1/6 log (n/δ)) time. Our algorithm utilizes several new concepts that we believe may be of independent interest: • We define a stochastic central path method. • We show how to maintain a projection matrix √ WA⊤ (AWA⊤)−1A√ W in sub-quadratic time under \ell2 multiplicative changes in the diagonal matrix W.
Filamentous recombinant human Tau activates primary astrocytes via an integrin receptor complex

Microtubule-associated protein Tau can form protein aggregates transmissible within the brain, correlating with the progression of tauopathies in humans. The transmission of aggregates requires neuron-released Tau to interact with surface receptors on target cells. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms in astrocytes and downstream effects are unclear. Here, using a spatially resolved proteomic mapping strategy, we show that integrin αV/β1 receptor binds recombinant human Tau, mediating the entry of Tau fibrils in astrocytes. The binding of distinct Tau species to the astrocytic αV/β1 receptor differentially activate integrin signaling. Furthermore, Tau-mediated activation of integrin signaling results in NFκB activation, causing upregulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines, induction of a sub-group of neurotoxic astrocytic markers, and release of neurotoxic factors. Our findings suggest that filamentous recombinant human Tau-mediated activation of integrin signaling induces astrocyte conversion towards a neurotoxic state, providing a mechanistic insight into tauopathies. The mechanisms underlying the transmission of Tau in astrocytes are unclear. Here, the authors show that the entry of filamentous recombinant human Tau into astrocytes via the integrin αV/ β1 complex stimulates integrin signaling, resulting in activation of NFκB and astrocyte conversion towards a neurotoxic state.
Overview and reassessment of noise budget of starshade exoplanet imaging

High-contrast imaging enabled by a starshade in formation flight with a space telescope can provide a near-term pathway to search for and characterize temperate and small planets of nearby stars. NASA’s Starshade Technology Development Activity to TRL5 (S5) is rapidly maturing the required technologies to the point at which starshades could be integrated into potential future missions. We reappraise the noise budget of starshade-enabled exoplanet imaging to incorporate the experimentally demonstrated optical performance of the starshade and its optical edge. Our analyses of stray light sources—including the leakage through micrometeoroid damage and the reflection of bright celestial bodies—indicate that sunlight scattered by the optical edge (i.e., the solar glint) is by far the dominant stray light. With telescope and observation parameters that approximately correspond to Starshade Rendezvous with Roman and Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx), we find that the dominating noise source is exozodiacal light for characterizing a temperate and Earth-sized planet around Sun-like and earlier stars and the solar glint for later-type stars. Further, reducing the brightness of solar glint by a factor of 10 with a coating would prevent it from becoming the dominant noise for both Roman and HabEx. With an instrument contrast of 10 − 10, the residual starlight is not a dominant noise, and increasing the contrast level by a factor 10 does not lead to any appreciable change in the expected science performance. If unbiased calibration of the background to the photon-noise limit can be achieved, Starshade Rendezvous with Roman could provide nearly photon-limited spectroscopy of temperate and Earth-sized planets of F, G, and K stars <4 parsecs away, and HabEx could extend this capability to many more stars <8 parsecs. Larger rocky planets around stars <8 parsecs would be within the reach of Roman. To achieve these capabilities, the exozodiacal light may need to be calibrated to a precision better than 2% and the solar glint to better than 5%. Our analysis shows that the expected temporal variability of the solar glint is unlikely to hinder the calibration, and the main challenge for background calibration likely comes from the unsmooth spatial distribution of exozodiacal dust in some stars. Taken together, these results validate the optical noise budget and technology milestones adopted by S5 against key science objectives and inform the priorities of future technology developments and science and industry community partnerships.
A Link Queue Model of Network Traffic Flow

Fundamental to many transportation network studies, traffic flow models can be used to describe traffic dynamics determined by drivers’ car-following, lane-changing, merging, and diverging behavior...
Stabilizing Optimal Density Control of Nonlinear Agents with Multiplicative Noise

Control of continuous time dynamics with multiplicative noise is a classic topic in stochastic optimal control. This work addresses the problem of designing infinite horizon optimal controls with stability guarantees for large populations of identical, non-cooperative and non-networked agents with multi-dimensional and nonlinear stochastic dynamics excited by multiplicative noise. For agent dynamics belonging to the class of reversible diffusion processes, we provide constraints on the state and control cost functions which guarantee stability of the closed-loop system under the action of the individual optimal controls. A condition relating the state-dependent control cost and volatility is introduced to prove the stability of the equilibrium density. This condition is a special case of the constraint required to use the path integral Feynman-Kac formula for computing the control. We investigate the connection between the stabilizing optimal control and the path integral formalism, leading us to a control law formulation expressed exclusively in terms of the desired equilibrium density.
Nominal GPA and Real GPA: A Simple Adjustment that Compensates for Grade Inflation.

Grade inflation is a long‐standing problem whose seriousness is demonstrated by a wide variety of studies of grade distributions. A few institutions have changed the information on their transcripts in an effort to account for it. Proposals to index grades have been largely unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. A simple index, the Real GPA, is calculated as a ratio of the individual student’s instructor‐assigned GPA to the average GPA of the class and expressed numerically on the same scale as the inflated assigned grade. Recorded on transcripts next to the Nominal GPA, the Real GPA makes the relative degree of inflation in a transcript immediately visible and creates positive pressures on academic standards.
What Do Unions Do?: The 2004 M-Brane Stringtwister Edition

The Journal of Labor Research 20th anniversary symposium review of What Do Unions Do? offers a unique opportunity to examine how the claims made in the book have fared in ensuing research and to ponder what parts of the book I would change if I could. This paper responds to the 18 critical essays in the journal. It recognizes three major errors of omission: failure to take account of unionism outside the US; failure to analyze public sector unionism; and failure to analyze the effects of unionism on economic growth; and the problem of determining the "optimal level of unionism" on the basis of estimates of what unions do. Ensuing research has found that What Do Unions Do? correctly identified union effects on turnover, fringe benefits, earnings inequality, political action, profits, managerial flexibility and human resource management, and that wage effects vary widely. Estimates of the union effect on productivity tend to be positive but modest, ruling out negative effects on average, but not conclusively establishing positive effects. Critical comments from some of the symposium panelists notwithstanding, I believe that the bulk of the evidence supports the What Do Unions Do? claim that management opposition has been a major factor in the decline in union density in the US.
The Unbureaucratic Personality

After 60 years of scholarship on the rule-bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes. The individual attributes investigated in this article include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all of which are expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be diminished by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule bending are discussed.
Humans Are Not Machines: The Behavioral Impact of Queueing Design on Service Time

Using behavioral experiments, we study the impact of queue design on worker productivity in service systems that involve human servers. Specifically, we consider two queue design features: queue st...
Canadian Provincial Budget Outcomes: A Long–run and Short–run Perspective

This paper tests a theory of public budgeting as a long–run and short–run process. In this model, political decision makers strive to achieve budgetary balance over the long–run but are constrained in the short–run and follow incremental decision–making. First, the budget equilibrium theory is elaborated upon and is used to explain the relationship between revenues, expenditures, and debt along with control variables one being provincial general elections. Second, the interaction between these variables is tested with a vector error correction model for each of the Canadian provinces using annual data between 1961 and 2000. The results show that in the long–run the driving force of provincial budgeting was expenditure control initiatives in seven of the ten provinces. In the short–run, incrementalism occurred in all of the provinces and a political business cycle was evident in six provinces.
Campaign Communications in U.S. Congressional Elections

Electoral campaigns are the foundation of democratic governance; yet scholarship on the content of campaign communications remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we advance research on U.S. congressional campaigns by integrating and extending extant theories of campaign communication. We test the resulting predictions with a novel dataset based on candidate Web sites over three election cycles. Unlike television advertisements or newspaper coverage, Web sites provide an unmediated, holistic, and representative portrait of campaigns. We find that incumbents and challengers differ across a broad range of behavior that reflects varying attitudes toward risk, that incumbents’ strategies depend on the competitiveness of the race, and that candidates link negative campaigning to other aspects of their rhetorical strategies. Our efforts provide researchers with a basis for moving toward a more complete understanding of congressional campaigns.
Banks, market organization, and macroeconomic performance: An agent-based computational analysis

This paper is an exploratory analysis of the role that banks play in supporting what Jevons called the “mechanism of exchange.” It considers a model economy in which exchange activities are facilitated and coordinated by a self-organizing network of entrepreneurial trading firms. Collectively, these firms play the part of the Walrasian auctioneer, matching buyers with sellers and helping the economy to reach prices at which peoples’ trading plans are mutually compatible. Banks affect macroeconomic performance in this economy because their lending activities facilitate the entry and influence the exit decisions of trading firms. Both entry and exit have ambiguous effects on performance, and we resort to computational analysis to understand how they are resolved. Our analysis draws an important distinction between normal and worst-case scenarios, with the economy experiencing systemic breakdowns in the latter. We show that banks can provide a “financial stabilizer” that more than counteracts the familiar financial accelerator, and that the stabilizing role of the banking system is particularly apparent in worst-case scenarios. In line with this result, we also find that under less restrictive lending standards banks are able to more effectively improve macroeconomic performance in the worst-case scenarios.
Do Vertical Mergers Facilitate Upstream Collusion

We investigate the impact of vertical mergers on upstream firms' ability to collude when selling to downstream firms in a repeated game. We show that vertical mergers give rise to an outlets effect: the deviation profits of cheating unintegrated firms are reduced as these firms can no longer profitably sell to the downstream affiliates of their integrated rivals. Vertical mergers also result in an opposing punishment effect: integrated firms typically make more profit in the punishment phase than unintegrated upstream firms. The net result of these effects in an unintegrated industry is to facilitate upstream collusion. We provide conditions under which further vertical integration also facilitates collusion.
The incremental impact of analyst initiation of coverage

Abstract I compare the return surrounding a sell-side analyst's initiation of coverage to the return surrounding a recommendation by an analyst who already covers the stock. The market responds more positively to analysts' initiations than to other recommendations. The incremental price impact of an initiation is 1.02% greater than the reaction to a recommendation by an analyst who already covers the stock. I examine whether the hypothesis that analyst coverage increases liquidity explains this incremental return. I find that liquidity improves after initiations, but that one must extend the liquidity hypothesis in order to fully explain the incremental price impact. Liquidity gains subsequent to analyst initiation depend on the analyst's recommendation. The more positive the initial recommendation, the greater the subsequent liquidity improvement. I also find that the initiation abnormal return correlates with the subsequent improvements in liquidity. Corporations should encourage analyst coverage to capture this liquidity benefit.
The World Food Economy in the Twenty‐first Century: Challenges for International Co‐operation

Fundamental changes in the world food economy pose new challenges for all participants in the food system, particularly in developing countries. This article focuses on the implications of these changes for international co-operation in food and agriculture. Concentrating especially on the FAO, it reviews the responses in monitoring, advocacy, resource mobilisation, regulation and technical and policy assistance activities. It is argued that the emerging food policy agenda, while addressing new challenges, must nevertheless keep at its centre the fight against hunger and malnutrition. However, shifts in the location and nature of hunger require that new approaches be developed to address this persistent and unacceptable global problem.
The Poetry of Genetics: On the Pitfalls of Popularizing Science

The role genetic inheritance plays in the way human beings look and behave is a question about the biology of human sexual reproduction, one that scientists connected with the Human Genome Project dashed to answer before the close of the twentieth century. This is also a question about politics, and, it turns out, poetry, because, as the example of Lucretius shows, poetry is an ancient tool for the popularization of science. "Popularization" is a good word for successful efforts to communicate elite science to non-scientists in non-technical languages and media. According to prominent sociobiologist E. 0. Wilson, "sexual dominance is a human universal." He meant, of course, that men dominate women. Like sociobiology, genetic science is freighted with politics, including gender politics. Scientists have gender perspectives that may color what they "see" in nature. As the late Susan Okin Miller suggested in an unpublished paper tracing the detrimental impact of Aristotle's teleology on Western thought, scientists accustomed to thinking that men naturally dominate women might interpret genetic discoveries accordingly. Biologists have good, scientific reasons to fight the effects of bias. One must be critical of how scientists and popularizers of science, like Genome author Matt Ridley, frame truth and theory. Ridley's "battle of the sexes" metaphor and others have a doubtfl place in serious explanations of science.
Transgovernmental Networks vs. Democracy: The Case of the European Information Privacy Network

Introduction 807 I. The Regulation of Information Privacy 813 A. European Information Privacy Policy 813 B. Application and Enforcement of Information Privacy Law 819 1. Modes of Implementing and Enforcing European Law 819 2. Administration of Information Privacy Law 824 3. Italian Implementation 827 II. Experience with the Regulation of International Data Transfers 830 III. Explaining Networks 834 A. The European Privacy Network 834 B. Implications for Transgovernmental Networks 845 IV. Evaluating Networks 846 A. The Law of the European Privacy Network: The Italian Case 846 B. The Administrative Practice of the European Privacy Network 855 C. Implications for Transgovernmental Networks 859 V. The European Parliament and the Transatlantic Dispute over Information Privacy ........ 861 Conclusion 867
Evaluating Government Bond Fund Performance with Stochastic Discount Factors

This article shows how to evaluate the performance of managed portfolios using stochastic discount factors (SDFs) from continuous-time term structure models. These models imply empirical factors that include time averages of the underlying state variables. The approach addresses a performance measurement bias, described by Goetzmann, Ingersoll, and Ivkovic (2000) and Ferson and Khang (2002), arising because fund managers may trade within the return measurement interval or hold positions in replicable options. The empirical factors contribute explanatory power in factor model regressions and reduce model pricing errors. We illustrate the approach on US government bond funds during 1986--2000. Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.
The ABA and the Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Defense Teams in Death Penalty Cases

On February 10, 2003, the American Bar Association House of Delegates overwhelmingly approved the revised ABA Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases (“ABA Guidelines”). In doing so, the ABA renewed the serious concerns it has voiced for decades about the fairness and reliability of the death penalty. All jurisdictions were urged to adopt the ABA Guidelines to ensure that capital trial and death row defendants had access to qualified, competent counsel and the expert assistance and funding that make capital legal representation meaningful. For the nation’s largest organization of lawyers, the quality and availability of counsel for those facing execution is of paramount concern. Although the ABA does not take a position on the death penalty itself, it has long recognized that “[a] system that would take life must first give justice.” The efforts of the ABA—through policy statements, amicus briefs, task forces, and projects such as the Death
Responding to Rawls: Toward a Consistent and Supportable Theory of Distributive Justice

Rawls' claim that undeserved traits cannot ground entitlement claim would appear to discount nationality as a factor in determining entitlements and would lead to cosmopolitanism. Attempts to avoid this result and justify domestic Rawlsianism invariably fail to do so. Thus, by limiting the application of his principles to the domestic front and rejecting their relevance internationally, Rawls was advocating an internally inconsistent position. Cosmopolitanism and libertarianism, on the other hand, while internally consistent, conflict with most people's considered opinions. The article explores the possibility of grounding an internally consistent social philosophy which would capture the middle ground between cosmopolitanism and libertarianism. It argues that distributive justice should be concerned with the satisfaction of needs, not the mitigation of inequality, and explores the contours and limits of a needs-based approach to justice. The article then considers whether, in regulating its internal affairs, a state may institute an internal redistribution which goes beyond the requirements of distributive justice. It posits that while distributive justice is limited to the satisfaction of needs, transactional justice, as embodied in benefit theory, may justify a more extensive redistribution.
Firm characteristics and the impact of emerging market liberalizations

Abstract We provide a firm level analysis of the impact of capital market liberalization in 18 emerging markets. Consistent with models of international asset pricing, we find that firms’ stock returns increase during liberalization and that a majority of firms have lower mean returns and lower dividend yields after liberalization. We also find that emerging market firms have increased exposure to the world market and decreased exposure to the home market following liberalization. These changes in returns and exposures support the predictions of theoretical international asset pricing models. We also test and find support for the importance of size, local risk, foreign exchange risk, and cross-listing status in explaining the cross-section of changes in returns.
Structural policies and growth: Time series evidence from a natural experiment☆

Documenting the long term impact of structural policies on economic performance has generated tremendous interest in the development literature. In contrast, contemporary effects of structural policies are difficult to establish. Structural policies seldom change sufficiently in the short run, and accepted instruments to control for endogeneity in cross sections are inappropriate for time series analysis. In this paper we utilize an eleven year panel of 26 transition countries to identify short term effects of structural policies that are large and significant. A ten percent change in the quality of structural policies (or the Rule of Law) towards OECD standards is shown to raise annual growth by about 2.5%. To control for endogeneity, we develop an instrument using the hierarchy of institutions hypothesis and find that it holds a robust explanatory power. We also document that early reformers reap the greatest benefits, but that it is never too late to begin structural policy reforms.
Immunity or Impunity? The Potential Effect of Prosecutions of State Officials for Core International Crimes in States Like the United States That Are Not Parties to the Statute of the International Criminal Court

Hugo Grotius, often called the father of international law, would be shocked to learn that in the 21st Century, the international community asserts the right to prosecute state officials for international crimes. Only since World War II has international law expanded to impose individual criminal responsibility on state officials. This article will focus on the impact of the International Court of Justice's decision on the immunity of state officials from prosecution for core international crimes in national courts and its interrelationship with the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Its basic premise is that the decision in Congo v. Belgium can plausibly be read to mean that the immunities of state officials from prosecution for core crimes in national courts remains intact. As a result, there is a danger that national courts will apply Congo v. Belgium to immunize state officials charged with core crimes. And, since the jurisdiction of the ICC is complementary, or secondary, to that of the states, “it must defer to any state, even a non-party to the treaty, that in good faith investigates and/or prosecutes a crime within its jurisdiction.” Part I of this article will briefly trace the development of state official immunity until the passage of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) by the United States Congress in 1976. At this watershed, state immunity diverged from state official immunity. Part II will discuss that until the decision in Congo v. Belgium, courts in the United States struggled with and divided over how to resolve questions of state official immunity, demonstrating the need for clear guidance on this issue. Part III delves into the fact that instead of providing the needed clarity, Congo v. Belgium did the opposite since it is susceptible to equally possible interpretations: 1) that there is no exception to state official immunity for core crimes in national courts; or 2) that there is an exception to the immunity of state officials in national courts when they are charged with core crimes. Part IV dissects the sources the ICJ relied on, resolving this quandary by revealing that the latter interpretation is the more viable. Finally, Part V of the article will examine the immunity provisions of the ICC Statute and demonstrate how officials from states, like the U.S., that are not parties to the ICC Statute could permanently escape the jurisdiction of the ICC.
Opening Bottlenecks: On Behalf of Mandated Network Neutrality

I. INTRODUCTION II. IN PRAISE OF NEUTRAL NETWORKS A. A Stable Platform for Innovation B. An Open Channel for Communication III. BOTTLENECKS AND ROADBLOCKS: ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL THREATS OF DISCRIMINATION A. Voice over Internet Protocol ("VoIP") B. Threatened Innovation C. Restrictions on Content D. Why Tomorrow Looks Scarier Than Today IV. CURRENT BROADBAND COMPETITION GUARANTEES LITTLE A. Reigning Duopolies Gaining Speed B. Regional Market Concentration Matters C. The Cable Television Precedent D. New Technologies Are Improbable Solutions V. AD HOC REGULATION Is INADEQUATE VI. MANDATING NEUTRALITY VII. REBUTTING COUNTER-ARGUMENTS A. Network Congestion B. Network Diversity C. Better to Wait and See D. Unintended Regulatory Consequences VIII. CONCLUDING BITS I. INTRODUCTION How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes flee, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! ... or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts! (1) In an interview last November, then-SBC Telecommunications CEO Edward Whitacre was exceptionally honest about his company's market position. Representing half of the broadband duopoly, (2) he confessed his industry's disproportionate market power and his intention to seek monopoly rents. SBC spokesman Michael Balmoris quickly insisted the company will not block consumer access to popular Web sites, but Whitacre's words--uttered the same week SBC won regulatory approval to buy ATT (9) the full House did the same just before passing H. …
Taxation and Liquidity

One of the principal determinants of an asset's return is its liquidity-the ease with which the asset can be bought and sold. Liquid assets yield a lower return than do otherwise comparable illiquid assets. This Article demonstrates that an income tax alters the tradeoff between asset liquidity and yield because: (i) high yields from illiquid assets are taxed; (2) imputed transaction services income from liquidity is untaxed; and (3) illiquidity costs are only sometimes deductible. As a result, assets have more liquidity and the price of liquidity in terms of yield is higher than it would be in the absence of an income tax. These distortions foster an excessively large financial sector, which exists in large part to create (tax-favored) liquidity. The tax wedge between liquidity and yield also creates clientele effects, in which low-rate taxpayers, such as nonprofit institutions, hold illiquid assets regardless of their liquidity needs. The liquidity/yield tax distortion also offers a new perspective on fundamental questions in federal income tax, such as the desirability of the realization requirement, preferential capital gains tax rates, and corporate taxation. These elements of the income tax mitigate or even negate the pro-liquidity tax bias identified in this Article. AUTHO R. Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law School. I thank Ian Ayres, Dhammika Dharmapala, Michael Graetz, Henry Hansmann, Louis Kaplow, Alvin Klevorick, Daniel Markovits, Reed Shuldiner, and seminar participants at Columbia Law School, Loyola Law School of Chicago, Harvard Law School, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the University of Texas Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Yale Law School for very helpful comments and discussions. All errors are my own.
Property's Morale

A foundational argument long invoked to justify stable property rights is that property law must protect settled expectations. Respect for expectations unites otherwise disparate strands of property theory focused on ex ante incentives, individual identity, and community. It also privileges resistance to legal transitions that transgress reliance interests. When changes in law unsettle expectations, such changes are thought to generate disincentives that Frank Michelman famously labeled demoralization costs. Although rarely approached in these terms, arguments for legal certainty reflect underlying psychological assumptions about how people contemplate property rights when choosing whether and how to work, invest, create, bolster identity, join a community, and make other decisions at property’s core. More precisely, demoralization is predicated on a kind of paralysis flowing from anxieties about instability, unfair singling out, and majoritarian expropriation that can be sparked in legal transitions.This prevailing psychological portrait of expectations has considerable intuitive appeal and is widely influential. It is, however, distinctly incomplete. This Article offers an alternative picture of the expectations with which people approach property and the corresponding anxieties that might cause people to hesitate. From this perspective, stability is less important than assurances that the legal system will respond when external forces threaten to overwhelm the value owners create, that it will provide a fair process of adjustment over time, and that it will ensure inclusion. In short, property law can offer morale benefits that are every bit as critical as demoralization costs. Property theory and doctrine often juxtapose ex ante certainty against ex post flexibility; however, a morale lens underscores that legal transitions can signal responsiveness as easily as instability. Doctrinally, this understanding recalibrates property law’s approach to expectation. Normatively, property’s largely ignored, but absolutely vital, morale function provides a framework for understanding how the legal system can buoy confidence in greater balance, fostering all of the work with which property is so rightly associated.
Metaphor and Analogy: The Sun and Moon of Legal Persuasion

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most accessible knowledge structures are active and available for filtering and framing what we see. So the answer to how to think about this new information arrives automatically and intuitively. Should the answer be an unhelpful one, recent analogy research suggests that novel metaphors and characterizations may be used to prompt or activate various schemas or knowledge structures beyond those that are initially accessible. If initial matches can be made, the resulting online processing of the novel metaphor or characterization resembles the more reflective decision making of System 2, a desirable persuasive result when the immediately accessible schemas yield an unfavorable answer.The analysis and recommendations in the article rely on two key findings from cognitive researchers who have studied both analogy and metaphor: (1) metaphors follow a career path as they evolve from being new to becoming conventional, and (2) novel metaphors tend to be more capable of generating knowledge while conventional metaphors tend to provide categories into which new information is unthinkingly slotted. Transferred to legal persuasion, these findings support a persuasive method intuitively recognized by lawyers: by shifting the way decision makers perceive and interpret situations involving people and events, novel characterizations and metaphors are sometimes able to compete with entrenched stereotypes and conventional categories. Moreover, the research may provide guidance for lawyers working to craft the right kinds of characterizations and metaphors to meet specific goals.
Issues in Presidential Election Forecasting: Election Margins, Incumbency, and Model Credibility

Three issues of presidential election forecasting research are raised. The first concerns the consequences for forecasting models of presidential elections becoming more narrowly decided. A realigned and polarized party system has led to smaller election margins in presidential contests since 1984. This development complicates model estimation and may also have blurred differences between strong and weak forecasting models. The second issue concerns the presidential incumbency advantage. Forecasting research has shed greater light on this important electoral factor. The advantage of presidential incumbency appears to be largely restricted to first party-term incumbents. This exposes what might be seen as a blind spot to electoral accountability. Finally, the issue of forecast model credibility is raised. Several criteria beyond forecast accuracy should be taken into account in assessing whether a forecast model and its prediction are credible.
Fighting the New Wars of Religion: The Need For a Tolerant First Amendment

The legal and political environment now mistakenly favors religion instead of religious liberty and fosters wars of religion instead of peaceful tolerance. To reinvigorate the ideal of religious liberty, this essay advocates a return to the roots of the First Amendment in the principle of religious tolerance or toleration. The principle of toleration has normative bite. In this essay, I identify three claims about toleration that are missing from current First Amendment law and politics. First, because toleration is a political and legal principle, toleration is skeptical about religious truth-claims and accordingly denies the state the power to enforce religious truth through force or law. Second, tolerance protects the individual against the power of both church and state. Third, toleration must extend beyond the diversity among Christian sects of old Europe and the young United States and stretch in directions not anticipated by the Framers. Following these standards modifies current law and politics. Under the principle of tolerance, contentious issues like gay marriage are resolved according to constitutional principles of liberty and equality rather than religious norms of Christian love. Churches and religious organizations are held to neutral laws of general applicability and not allowed special privileges to harm their members. Government funding of religion is not permitted. Public Christian displays are supplemented with the signs and symbols of other religions and philosophies. The end result is less intolerant religion and more religious liberty.
Subsidies, entry and the distribution of R&D investment

Abstract We analyze the link between entry and R&D spending distribution. We consider a monopolistic competitive market with free entry in which firms can invest in cost-cutting R&D by paying a fixed cost first. For an intermediate level of fixed cost, there is a unique equilibrium in which the market segments into investing and non-investing firms. We show that the measure of R&D investing firms decreases as entry occurs. Using this result, we show how alternative government policies affect the R&D spending distribution. In particular, we characterize the cases in which incentives to promote R&D spending can result in exit. We show that while subsidy to entry may be welfare neutral from the consumers' point of view, R&D subsidies, despite promoting exit sometimes, are always welfare improving. Data motivating these results are drawn from the Taiwanese and Korean semiconductor industries.
Diagonal Public Enforcement

Civics class teaches the traditional mode of law enforcement: the legislature adopts a regulatory statute and the executive enforces it in the courts. But in an increasingly interconnected world, a nontraditional form of regulatory litigation is possible in which public enforcers from one government enforce laws adopted by a second government in the second government’s courts. One government provides the executive, while a different government provides the legislature and judiciary. I call this unusual form of interstate relations “diagonal public enforcement.” Although diagonal public enforcement has escaped systematic study, one can find examples in American courts going back more than a century. Foreign governments have used American courts to enforce federal antitrust laws, state environmental laws, and civil rights statutes, among others. Just last term, the Supreme Court heard a case in which the European Commission sued American tobacco companies in a New York federal court under the federal RICO statute. Diagonal public enforcement occurs within the U.S. system as well. States routinely enforce federal laws in federal courts, and opportunities exist for states to enforce sister-state laws, especially with respect to climate change and other cross-border issues. Despite these examples, diagonal public enforcement appears to some as a category error: why would legislatures ever rely on foreign governments to enforce domestic law, and why would foreign executives take up the offer? In light of these questions, this Article attempts to demystify diagonal public enforcement by exploring when it would be consistent with the rational pursuit of legislative and executive interests. Legislatures are likely to authorize diagonal public enforcement in order to increase deterrence or influence global regulation. Executives are likely to “forum shop” for diagonal options in order to achieve better outcomes in foreign courts. These predictions explain existing patterns of enforcement, and they are suggestive of a larger role for diagonal public enforcement in the coming years. Finally, this Article critically evaluates the costs and benefits of diagonal public enforcement at the inter-state, intra-state, and individual levels. At first glance, diagonal public enforcement may seem to raise common concerns about the diffusion of regulatory authority, the extraterritorial reach of domestic law, and the interference in foreign sovereign relationships. However, upon closer scrutiny, diagonal public enforcement turns out to have the capacity to improve enforcement efficacy, promote the public interest, protect foreign and minority interests, and nudge gridlocked institutions. Though, of course, this will depend on conscientious institutional design.
Borrower protection and the supply of credit: Evidence from foreclosure laws

Laws governing the foreclosure process can have direct consequences for the costs of foreclosure and, therefore could affect lending decisions. We exploit the heterogeneity in judicial requirements across US states to examine their impact on banks’ lending decisions in a sample of urban areas straddling state borders. A key feature of our study is the way it exploits an exogenous cutoff in loan eligibility to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) guarantees, which shift the burden of foreclosure costs onto the GSEs. We find that judicial requirements reduce the supply of credit only for jumbo loans, which are ineligible for GSE guarantees, i.e., in the nonsubsidized segment of the market. Thus, while we find a significant effect on credit supply, the aggregate impact is muted by the indirect cross-subsidy by the GSEs to borrower-friendly states.