cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Well-Being and Public Policy

Governments rely on certain basic economic metrics and tools to analyze prospective laws and policies and to monitor how well their countries are doing. For decades, critics of such economic measures have argued that they ignore important aspects of value that are not fully reflected by output or by willingness to pay (WTP). In recent years, one of the most important developments in social science has been the emergence of psychological research measuring subjective well-being (SWB) or “happiness.” Researchers have made great strides in replicating and validating their findings about happiness, and world leaders have called for this research to be used to supply SWB-based metrics and tools as alternatives to the existing economic ones. In response to these calls, early efforts have been made to use SWB research to create new social indicators. In this chapter, we discuss some of the efforts that have been made in this regard. We first briefly explain the way that SWB is measured and the way those measurements have been validated. We then explain our own contribution — well-being analysis (WBA) — which uses happiness data to analyze prospective policies more accurately than does cost-benefit analysis. Next, we cover the ways in which SWB data have been used to generate prices that can be used by traditional economic analysis. We then discuss attempts to revise cost-benefit analysis to deal with the limitations stemming from the fact that it uses wealth to assess the effects of policy on quality of life. Finally, we lay out the strides that have been made toward creating an SWB-based alternative to GDP.
Doing good instead of doing well? What lawyers could be doing in a world of “too many” lawyers

This paper explores some of the misalignment in the legal profession in terms of allocation to particular parts of the profession. The paper suggests that there are not “too many lawyers,” but that lawyers could and should be doing other things, beyond conventional forms of legal representation, both for access to justice, and for transformations of the legal system and human problem solving. Lawyers can perform different roles in dispute resolution (mediating, arbitrating, negotiating, as well as litigating), including performing design functions for organizations and other sites of iterated disputes, advising individuals and entities about how to handle and “manage” conflict in order to actually reduce the need for conventional legal services. The paper explores issues of what constitutes “legal knowledge and expertise” and how such knowledge might be deployed to solve complex social and legal problems outside of conventional legal professional boundaries. Contrasts are made with other areas of expertise and the restructuring of professional knowledge in other fields such as business consulting and architecture. The paper concludes by suggesting that lawyers and legal educators need to proactively reframe what is considered to be legal work and legal education for new ways of legal and human problem solving to be studied and learned. Este articulo analiza algunos desajustes en la distribucion de determinadas partes de la abogacia. Se sugiere que no hay "demasiados abogados", sino que los abogados podrian y deberian estar haciendo otras cosas, mas alla de los sistemas convencionales de representacion legal, tanto en el acceso a la justicia, como en las transformaciones del sistema juridico y la resolucion de conflictos humanos. Los abogados pueden asumir diferentes papeles en la resolucion de conflictos (mediacion, arbitraje, negociacion, o defensa juridica), incluyendo el diseno de funciones para organizaciones y otras instituciones dedicadas a las disputas, aconsejando a individuos y entidades sobre como manejar y “gestionar” los conflictos, con el fin de reducir de forma real la necesidad de los servicios juridicos convencionales. El articulo explora los asuntos relacionados con "el conocimiento y la experiencia juridica" y como se puede utilizar este conocimiento para resolver problemas sociales y legales complejos que quedan fuera de los limites profesionales juridicos convencionales. Se comparan con otras areas de conocimiento y con la reestructuracion de los conocimientos profesionales en otros campos, como las empresas consultoras y de arquitectura. El articulo concluye sugiriendo que abogados y profesores de derecho deben replantear de forma proactiva lo que se considera trabajo legal y educacion juridica, para estudiar y aprender nuevas formas de resolver conflictos humanos y legales. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2269818
Earnings Smoothing, Cash Flow Volatility, and CEO Cash Bonus

Prior studies generally relate managers’ decisions to smooth earnings to their desire to maximize their overall compensation and to smooth their consumption. However, earnings smoothing could also be driven by the firm's expected benefits from reporting a smooth earnings stream. Our paper provides empirical support for the latter explanation of earnings smoothing. Specifically, we find that while CEO bonus on average increases with earnings smoothing, the increase is larger when the firm's cash flow volatility is higher. Further, CEO bonus is shielded from the negative effects of lower earnings arising from the need to report a smoother earnings stream.
Evidence for lunar true polar wander and a past low‐eccentricity, synchronous lunar orbit

As first noted 200 years ago by Laplace, the Moon's rotational and tidal bulges are significantly larger than expected, given the Moon's present orbital and rotational state. This excess deformation has been ascribed to a fossil figure, frozen in when the Moon was closer to the Earth. However, the observed figure is only consistent with an eccentric and non-synchronous orbit, contrary to our understanding of the Moon's formation and evolution. Here, we show that lunar mascons and impact basins have a significant contribution to the observed lunar figure. Removing their contribution reveals a misaligned fossil figure consistent with an early epoch of true polar wander (driven by the formation of the South Pole-Aitken Basin) and an early low-eccentricity, synchronous lunar orbit. This new self-consistent model solves a long-standing problem in planetary science and will inform future studies of the Moon's dynamical evolution and early dynamo.
Customary Law and Authority in a State under Construction: The Case of South Sudan

Abstract Customary law in South Sudan is a powerful symbol of emancipation from two centuries of external domination, and paradoxically, also the product of such external domination. Most citizens of the world’s newest state rely more on customary laws and local authorities to regulate their conflicts than on other civilian state institutions and statutory law. At the current juncture, influential decision-makers in and outside the government are pushing to develop Sudan’s customary laws into a Common Law for South Sudan. However, the legacy of the armed conflict, including patterns of militarization, and the ongoing modernization of society, pose challenges for customary systems. Furthermore, customary systems exhibit certain human rights deficits and, therefore, need to be made compatible with the constitutional framework of South Sudan. The recognition of customary authority and law as an essential part of the governance structure, coupled with targeted engagement and reform, are indispensable elements of state and peace building in South Sudan. The government and its external partners must walk a tightrope to integrate the local capacity offered by the customary system into their wider efforts without inadvertently stifling its potential to reform from within or undermining democratically elected institutions.
The Effect of Type of Internal Control Report on Users’ Confidence in the Accompanying Financial Statement Audit Report*

We develop and test a model that links internal control over financial reporting (ICOFR) disclosures to users’ confidence in the standard audit report (SAR) on the financial statements. The model suggests that users’ confidence in the SAR is determined by the consistency of the message conveyed by the two audit reports. Based on this model, we hypothesize that users’ confidence in the SAR is lower in the presence of an entity level material weakness compared to an account specific material weakness and both confidence assessments are lower than the confidence assessments associated with the unqualified ICOFR report. We also propose that SAR confidence assessments affect investment judgments. We tested these hypotheses in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 65 equity analysts indicated their confidence in the SAR, assessed the risk of a stock price decline, and provided a stock recommendation on a public company that had received a SAR and an adverse ICOFR report (describing either an entity level or an account specific material weakness). In Experiment 2, 70 average investors evaluated the same company but were randomly assigned to three conditions (same adverse control conditions as in experiment 1 and an unqualified ICOFR condition). In addition, they provided assessments of information and verification risks, which allowed us to directly test our model. The findings are as hypothesized and support the notion that the apparent inconsistency between an adverse ICOFR report and the SAR undermines confidence in the SAR. Finally, confidence in the SAR affects investment judgments (risk of stock price decline) and decisions (stock recommendations).
The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services

Law is an information technology—a code that regulates social life. In our age, the machinery of information technology is growing exponentially in power, not only in hardware, but also in the software capacity of the programs that run on computers. As a result, the legal profession faces a great disruption. Information technology has already had a huge impact on traditional journalism, causing revenues to fall by about a third and employment to decrease by about 17,000 people in the last eight years1 and very substantially decreasing the market value of newspapers. Because law consists of more specialized and personalized information, the disruption is beginning in law after journalism. But, its effects will be as wide ranging. Indeed they may ultimately be greater, because legal information is generally of higher value, being central to the protection of individuals’ lives and property. The disruption has already begun. In discovery, for instance, computationally based services are already replacing the task of document review that lawyers have performed in the past. But computational services are on the cusp of substituting for other legal tasks—from the generation of legal documents to predicting outcomes in litigation. And when machine intelligence becomes as good as lawyers in developing some service or some factor of production that contributes to a service, it does not stop improving. Intelligent machines will become better and better, both in terms of performance and cost. And unlike humans, they can work ceaselessly around the clock, without sleep or caffeine. Such continuous technological acceleration in computational power is the difference between previous technological improvements in legal services and those driven by machine intelligence. This difference makes it the single most important
Learning and Forgetting: The Dynamics of Aircraft Production

This paper introduces a new cost dataset for a commercial aircraft firm and uses this data to analyze the dynamics of learning in commercial aircraft production. This dataset is found to be inconsistent with the simple learning hypothesis, and particularly the prediction that a firm's unit cost must decline with its cumulative production. Instead, strong support is found for the hypothesis of organizational forgetting, a more general learning model where unit costs are similarly dependent on a firm's past production experience, but where that experience depreciates over time. Additionally, it is found that some, but not all, of a firm's production experience transfers from one generation of an aircraft to the next. This evidence adds to our understanding of productivity in industries with learning and thus has implications to many fields of economics.
Medical Evidence and Expertise in Abortion Jurisprudence

For another thing, the division of medical opinion about the matter at most means uncertainty, a factor that signals the presence of risk, not its absence. That division here involves highly qualified knowledgeable experts on both sides of the issue.—Stenberg v. Carhart, 20001 While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.—Gonzales v. Carhart, 20072
Risk taking and failure in de novo savings and loans in the 1980s

This article examines failure rates in de novo S&Ls that initiated operations during the 1980–1986 period. Overall failure rates are similar to those for existing institutions but are found to vary significantly by location, time of charter, and organizational form. Both univariate tests and results from a probability-of-failure model indicate that inadequate capital, economic stress, poor management of higher risk lending allowed by broader powers, and operating inefficiencies contributed significantly to the likelihood of failure. Use of brokered funds and rapid asset growth are also significantly related to failure likelihood. Interestingly, for those S&Ls which eventually failed, rapid asset growth and high proportions of nonperforming assets actually delayed the timing of their failure. We interpret this to be the result of regulatory forbearance. We also find significant differences between the financial characteristics of de novo and non-de novo S&Ls.
Ex ante versus ex post expectation damages

Abstract What information should courts utilize when assessing contract damages? Should they award damages that were rationally foreseeable at the ex ante stage ( ex ante expected damages )? Or should they award damages at the ex post level, incorporating new information revealed after contracting ( ex post actual damages )? In practice courts have varied between the two approaches, awarding damages equal to the lower, or the higher, of the two measures of damages. This article shows that ex ante expectation damages are more efficient than ex post actual damages through a simple model of costly litigation for contract breach, where there are either costs of verifying the breach victim's ex post damages, or general litigation costs such as attorneys’ fees. Courts should award foreseeable flat damages, rather than seeking ex post accuracy and awarding actual damages, because actual damages lead to distortions in breach incentives once we take parties’ litigation decisions as endogenous. With costly litigation, ex post expectation damages may cause over-performance or under-performance depending on whether the American or the English rule applies and on the size of the litigation cost. We find that regardless of the direction of the distortion, actual damages induce inefficiency. Ex ante damages are more efficient because of the insensitivity of parties’ litigation decisions to their ex post private information under fixed damages. Our results are robust when accounting for renegotiation.
Systemic Changes that Could Reduce the Conviction of the Innocent

In a utopian world, juries would always reach the correct result. In the real world, they don t. When they don t, which way do they tend to err? Which way do we want them to err? The theoretical answer to the second question is clear. We want juries to err on the side of acquitting guilty people rather than convicting innocent ones. In the leading American case on requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt, In Re Winship, the United States Supreme Court held that the Due Process Clause required a state to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt in order to obtain a conviction. The Court identified three independent reasons for requiring this standard: (1) Fairness to the accused, (2) The community s need to be sure of the guilt of those it condemns, and (3) The security of every citizen in knowing that if he or she is ever accused of a crime, the State will have to prove its case against them beyond a reasonable doubt. Justice Harlan concurred on the ground that it is far worse to convict an innocent man than it is to acquit one who is guilty. But do we really believe that? How many guilty child molesters are we
Antibiotic Maximalism: Legislative Assaults on the Evidence-Based Treatment of Lyme Disease

Amidst public-health efforts to prevent antibiotic-resistant pathogens by reining in excessive antibiotic use, several states have passed laws that legitimize intensive antibiotic regimens even when those regimens contradict the best available medical evidence. Although this unprecedented legislative activity has occurred in the context of a controversial medical diagnosis — chronic Lyme disease — the legal and political repercussions threaten the established role of state medical licensing boards in promoting evidence-based standardization of medical practice. The most intrusive of these statutes prevents state licensing boards from disciplining physicians who prescribe regimens of “long-term antibiotic therapy” that are specifically proscribed by mainstream clinical practice guidelines (CPG) on Lyme disease treatment. Such laws promote the view of non-standard practitioners who favor the intensive, maximalist use of antibiotics for a condition that mainstream physicians dispute even exists. In an attempt to protect unnecessary antibiotic regimens, recent legislation legitimizes a treatment paradigm that poses an undue risk of harm to individual patients, and also to the public health.
Sentiment and Corporate Bond Valuations before and after the Onset of the Credit Crisis

Stock market sentiment is an important driver of corporate bond valuations. Using transactions from the Trading and Compliance Engine (TRACE), the authors find that sentiment is negatively related to bond yield spreads, with the impact being stronger after the onset of the recent financial crisis. The negative effect of sentiment on yields is stronger when fundamental risk and liquidity frictions are higher, which points to a direct role of sentiment in the bond market whereby rational bond investors are unable in these high-risk/high-friction scenarios to correct the mispricing generated by other bond investors. The authors also find that the sentiment effect is stronger when the returns to capital structure arbitrage are higher, suggesting that sentiment also spills over to the bond market through the activity of invesinvestors dedicated to correcting relative stock and bond value mispricings within the same firm. They further provide evidence that after the onset of the crisis, sentiment also helps explain the extent to which the corporate bond market and the equity market are integrated.
The Separation of Powers as a Safeguard of Nationalism

In his important article Separation of Powers as a Safeguard of Federalism,1 Bradford Clark argues that the procedures set forth in the Constitution for creating supreme federal law were designed to, and do, protect the interests of the states. I argue here that Clark tells only half the story. The procedures set forth in the Constitution also operate, and were designed to operate, to safeguard nationalism. This fact does not require a rejection of Clark’s claim that the Constitution’s enumeration of specified procedures for federal lawmaking rules out procedures less protective of state interests.2 Thus, it turns out that Clark’s principal doctrinal claim is quite independent of his claim about federalism. But Clark’s doctrinal story is also incomplete. It is equally true that the Constitution rules out the judiciary’s imposition of additional obstacles to federal lawmaking. Moreover, recognition that the Founders’ specification of procedures for federal lawmaking reflects a careful balance between federalism and nationalism calls into question a number of Clark’s subsidiary doctrinal claims. Clark argues that the Constitution’s specification of three particular mechanisms for the creation of supreme federal law—enactment of statutes through the procedures of bicameralism and presentment, conclusion of treaties by the President with the consent of two-thirds
Is There a Third Way for Industrial Relations

There has been little systematic analysis of what the ‘Third Way’ means in the sphere of industrial relations. This paper examines the record of the New Labour government in order to evaluate the distinctiveness, innovation and coherence of its industrial relations policy. It argues that many of the limitations of this policy result from the institutional context within which it was introduced. In comparative perspective, Third Way industrial relations can be thought of as a policy adaptation specific to centre‐left governments in weakly co-ordinated liberal market economies.
Stocks with extreme past returns: Lotteries or insurance?

Abstract The paper shows that lottery-like stocks are hedges against unexpected increases in market volatility. The loading on the aggregate volatility risk factor explains the majority of low abnormal returns to stocks with high maximum returns in the past month (Bali et al., 2011) and high expected skewness (Boyer et al., 2010). Aggregate volatility risk also explains the new evidence that the maximum effect and the skewness effect are stronger for firms with high market to book or high expected probability of bankruptcy.
Measuring Learner Engagement in Computer-Equipped College Classrooms.

Although engagement and learning appear linked, quantitatively measuring this relationship is challenging. New technologies offer a window into studying the interactions among classroom activity, student engagement, and positive learning outcomes in computer-equipped classrooms. A Classroom Behavioral Analysis System (CBAS) was developed to measure student engagement in a college writing class, and to test the hypothesis that an interactive lesson would increase student engagement levels in a computer-equipped classroom. Student computer-based behaviors (off-task and on-task internet visits) were compared during a traditional, lecture-based lesson (no-simulation condition) and an interactive simulation-based lesson (simulation condition). The dependent variable was student engagement as measured by the number of off-task and on-task internet activities during the lesson. Offtask internet activities were operationalized as website visits that were not part of the classroom activity; on-task internet activities included websites that related to the assigned class activity. CBAS recorded all student computer actions during the observed instructional periods. Students attending a simulation-based lesson performed more on-task internet actions, and signifi cantly fewer off-task internet actions than did students attending a lecture-based lesson. These fi ndings support
Cell Phone Towers as Visual Pollution

Cell phone towers are just the most recent target of visual pollution complaints. The term visual pollution has been used by courts, academics, and environmental groups to explain their distaste for ugly buildings, telephone towers, billboards, flags and signs, and numerous other images that have been derided as polluting the visual landscape. The idea of pollution helps explain the controversy surrounding the aesthetics of cell phone towers. Claims of visual pollution assert a desire for a particular kind of environment, one free from the polluting effects of unwanted signs, towers, and other sights. Some local governments have tried to legislate the kinds of places where towers should or should not be located, but those efforts have met with mixed success and sporadic application. The federal Telecommunications Act (TCA) intervenes in that process by insisting that local governments offer substantial evidence to justify their zoning decisions concerning cell phone towers. Local governments continue to be especially suspect to constituent complaints about the sight of cell phone towers even as the courts frequently find that such complaints fail to satisfy the TCA’s substantial evidence standard. This essay analyzes the idea of visual pollution in the context of cell phone towers. It describes the nature of, and responses to, visual pollution. It then examines the debate concerning the aesthetics of cell phone towers, which pits affected residents against cellular providers, with local governments exercising their traditional powers of land use regulation while being constrained by the TCA’s effort to promote wireless services. I then reflect on the lessons that the idea of pollution offer for controversies regarding cell phone towers, and the lessons that the cell phone tower controversies offer for understanding pollution in other contexts.
The Cross-Section of Expected Returns in the Secondary Corporate Loan Market

Corporate loans increasingly have become an important part of portfolio management with the advent of a liquid and transparent secondary market. This paper examines the pricing of characteristics and betas in the cross-section of expected loan returns. Expected loan returns decrease with default beta. Default beta contains information not captured by rating or spread-to-maturity. Among loan characteristics, a 3-month formation momentum strategy earns a monthly premium of 122 bps. Momentum is prominent in loans issued by the lowest-rated borrowers.
Pension Reform, Financial Market Development, and Economic Growth; Preliminary Evidence From Chile

The Chilean pension reform of 1981, in which Chile moved from an unfunded to a funded scheme, is considered to have contributed to this country’s excellent economic performance since the mid-1980s. The paper highlights the theoretical underpinnings of the claimed economic effects and presents empirical data and preliminary econometric testing of the conjectured growth, capital formation, and saving effects. The empirical evidence is consistent with most of the claims. In particular, the direct impact of financial market development on private saving is found to be negative, which underscores the importance of sound fiscal policy and public saving to support the transition.
Incremental variables and the investment opportunity set

Abstract Variables with strong marginal explanatory power in cross-section asset pricing regressions typically show less power to produce increments to average portfolio returns, for two reasons. (1) Adding an explanatory variable can attenuate the slopes in a regression. (2) Adding a variable with marginal explanatory power always attenuates the values of other explanatory variables in the extremes of a regression’s fitted values. Without a restriction on portfolio weights, the maximum Sharpe ratios in the GRS statistic of Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken (1989) provide little information about an incremental variable’s impact on the portfolio opportunity set.
Haircuts: Estimating investor losses in sovereign debt restructurings, 1998–2005

Abstract We calculate investor losses (“haircuts”) and recovery values in recent debt restructurings in Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, and Uruguay. Haircuts are computed as the percentage difference between the present values of old and new instruments, discounted at the yield prevailing immediately after the exchange. Recovery value means value received in terms of outstanding principal. We find average NPV haircuts ranging from 13% (Uruguay external exchange) to 73% (2005 Argentina exchange); recovery values range from 30% to about 75%. We also find within-exchange variations in haircuts and recovery values, depending on the bond tendered. With a few exceptions, domestic residents do not appear to have been treated systematically better (or worse) than foreign residents.
Political rights, republican freedom, and temporary workers

I defend a neo-republican account of the right to have political rights. Neo-republican freedom from domination is a sufficient condition for the extension of political rights not only for permanent residents, but also for temporary residents, unauthorized migrants, and some expatriates. I argue for the advantages of the neo-republican account over the social membership account, the affected-interest account, the stakeholder account, and accounts based on the justification of state coercion.
The Significance of the Shift Toward As-Applied Challenges in Election Law

Election law is experiencing immense change. The Supreme Court’s recent approach to election law cases has significant implications for the scope of the right to vote and the meaning of political participation and self-governance. This Article examines the importance of the Court’s recent pronouncement that plaintiffs can bring election law challenges only as applied to a particular political actor for a particular situation, instead of challenging a law in its entirety. 1 The “as-applied only” rule may seem like simply a procedural method for construing election laws or a mere semantic distinction, but, as I show, in reality the Court’s decisions have significant substantive ramifications. Shortly before the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 2 upholding the right of states to require that voters show a photo identification to vote, noted election law scholar Professor Rick Hasen warned of the perils of a ruling that narrowed the scope of election law litigation solely to as-applied challenges. 3 He explained that such an approach would make those laws “no longer . . . subject to facial challenges. That means, in turn, that the laws will have to be in effect for a while before they are challenged, and that they will cause damage in the interim, at a minimum.” 4 He also
Representations Involving Fiduciary Entities: Who is the Client?

The professional responsibility rules require attorneys to comply with certain ethics requirements when representing clients, and these responsibilities may vary depending on who is identified as the client. This article explores the option of treating an estate or trust as the client rather than the fiduciary that represents that entity, as a method to better conform to the need for certain attorney responses to predictable ethics issues (such as the duty of confidentiality to a defalcating fiduciary).
Law as Asymmetric Information: Theory, Application, and Results in the Context of Foreign Direct Investment in Real Estate

In his seminal 1970 article on lemon markets, George Akerlof posited the possibility of market failure in the presence of asymmetric information regarding a good’s value. In the intervening four decades, the importance of accurate valuation information has grown as transnational trade has boomed. The aim of the instant article is to assess the potential impact on transnational trade of asymmetric information regarding the legal attributes of a given good. Inaccurate or asymmetric information regarding relevant legal attributes may give rise to the same problem of market failure that Akerlof initially posited. If buyers are unsure of the ownership of a good, its conveyability, or their rights and obligations in a given transaction, they might decline to transact at all. If these legal uncertainties are pervasive, transactions in that market might cease to take place altogether.Nonetheless, consistent with the remainder of Akerlof’s article, the presence of certain counteracting institutions may lessen the impact of asymmetric information, thus forestalling market failure. These counteracting institutions in the context of asymmetric information regarding legal attributes would include a fully and fairly functioning judiciary, publicized and lucid laws and regulations, and other such mechanisms that would make clear the rights and obligations of all parties to a transaction. Thus, this article addresses the possibility of law as asymmetric information in the general sense and the specific, by assessing whether asymmetries regarding property law might contribute to market failure in the context of foreign direct investment in real estate. Regardless of whether that market is a lemons market, the conclusions of this article support systemic reform in the property regimes of developing and transition economies, to ensure that shortcomings in the institutional and legal frameworks of these states do not hinder fuller economic development.
Conditional Spending and Compulsory Maternity

More than 45 million Americans are uninsured, and even more are seeking government assistance accessing healthcare, rendering the conditions placed on government spending a timely and significant issue. Federal funding often demands a sacrifice of the recipient, meaning that Congress can condition the receipt of federal funds on certain statutory prerequisites. Given the demand to expand the nation's major public healthcare programs, it is important to reconsider the Supreme Court's Spending Clause jurisprudence. The Court's major decisions regarding conditional spending have facilitated a disconnect that analytically separates the individual from the conditional spending program, a divide that has allowed Congress to impinge on individual rights when it could not otherwise do so. The Court's decisions allowing government to burden the privacy right to obtain abortion by withholding funds in public healthcare programs, particularly Medicaid, provide a striking example of this disconnect. The so-called Hyde Amendment and the jurisprudence upholding its constitutionality spawned many similar federal funding limitations; at least eight federal laws prohibit spending on abortion and related services. This article divides these statutes into two categories and dubs them "pure funding statutes" and "conscience clause funding statutes." The number of pure funding and conscience clause funding statutes highlights the breach created and maintained in the law between the condition on spending and the individual at the macro level and protecting women's reproductive access at the micro level. This article suggests that the Court's existing test for the constitutionality of conditions on federal spending could protect the interests of individuals when applied in full, which has not been the Court's practice. The article also concludes that, given the makeup of the Roberts Court and the balance of Congress, the more likely solution is one of legislative constitutionalism. In other words, Congress should remove these funding limitations from legislation, not only because such limitations may be unconstitutional, but also because they represent an ongoing disconnect in the law that aggrandizes the spending power.
Legislative Oversight of Police: Lessons Learned from an Investigation of Police Handling of Demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

There are various ways to oversee police behavior including internal discipline, civilian review boards, civil law suits, and criminal prosecutions. These are important tools but an equally important but less examined mechanism is legislative oversight, and, in particular, the legislative investigation. A legislature may choose to review police policies concerning the use of surveillance, informants and undercover operatives, the implementation of community policing, the use of force, eradication of gang activity, and perhaps most prominently in the post 9/11 world, counter terrorism initiatives. All of these matters involve policy decisions at the departmental level and not actions taken at the discretion of individual officers in the field. The aim of legislative oversight is not to micro-manage police decisions, but to structure those decisions in line with best practices and within constitutional boundaries. Acting through their elected representatives, communities can have a say, for example, about shoot to kill policies, random searches of people on busses and trains, and the keeping of dossiers on individuals and groups. This Article identifies the benefits and limits of local legislative investigations as a means of police oversight by looking at the 2003 investigation of the Metropolitan Police Department by the City Council of the District of Columbia. The investigation focused on the police mishandling of anti-globalization demonstrations held in Washington D.C. from 2000-2003 and led, ultimately, to the drafting of model legislation, "The First Amendment Rights and Police Standards Act of 2004," enacted in 2005. As the Article explains, legislative investigations enable the government to address police practices at a systemic level, are more likely to gain the co-operation of the police since the aim is not to affix blame per se, can more forward with relative speed, and are likely to result in improvements since the legislature is directly invested in the effort and controls the levers of reform. Legislative investigations also have some potential to counter the "dual messages" phenomenon that allows police to acknowledge the rules that limit their behavior but to flout them at the same time. Formal policies and official pronouncements of police departments never approve of violation of rights, or permit brutality, corruption, or unlawful conduct. But informal messages from police leaders, rank and file, citizen groups, or even the media may communicate a different set of norms which appear to look past or even encourage these kinds of transgressions. A legislative investigation can publicly affirm the need to adhere to the rules and show that there are consequences if police rules and constitutional rights are violated. Finally the article discusses the keys to conducting a successful legislative investigation of the police and describes the legislative changes resulting from the District of Columbia police investigation.
Developing Countries and Environmental Protection: Contract Design in Perfectly Correlated Environments

I study the problem faced by an asymmetrically informed supranational governmental authority (SNGA) with limited funds that wishes to design an international environmental agreement (IEA) for less developed countries (LDCs). The SNGA cannot contract directly with polluting firms in the various LDCs, but it must deal with such firms through their national governments. I study this tripartite hierarchical interaction for two LDCs. My principal result is that despite the perfect correlation in the private information of the governments and the firms across the two countries, and in contrast with the result contained in Batabyal (1998a), the SNGA cannot implement a first-best IEA.
Preconstitutional Federal Power

In two fields of constitutional law, the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the federal government may possess preconstitutional power, or national authority derived not from the Constitution but from the very fact of sovereignty. This Article analyzes the two areas of law - the Foreign Affairs Power and the Indian Affairs Power - and assesses their viability in future cases. The case recognizing a preconstitutional Foreign Affairs Power resting with the Executive branch, United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., suffers from poor historical reasoning and has little precedential weight in modern foreign affairs cases, but has never been overruled. The Indian Affairs Power case, United States v. Lara, decided in 2004, included no historical reasoning and only offered the theory as dicta. However, the Court raised the theory, perhaps, as a means of placating the textualists on the Court who do not view the Indian Commerce Clause as a viable source of Congressional power in Indian Affairs. This Article offers a best defense for the proposition that Congressional plenary power in Indian Affairs might derive from a preconstitutional source, a defense that includes the original understanding of the Indian Affairs Power and that, unlike the Foreign Affairs Power, did survive the ratification of the Constitution.
Assessing Reforms of Government Accounting and Budgeting

Fiscal reforms in government are continually proposed, frequently adopted, and usually assessed as failing to achieve their desired outcomes. This paper develops a broad contingency framework that ...
Can Any Legal Theory Constrain Any Judicial Decision

A growing number of legal scholars have recently revived the American legal realist thesis that legal theory does not dictate the result in any particular case because legal theory itself is indeterminate. A more radical group has added that theory can never constrain judicial practice. I will present a spectrum of types of legal theories to demonstrate that the position of the more radical group of writers is correct—that legal theory is inherently incapable of identifying which party should win any given case. Tags: legal theory, judicial decisions, legal realist thesis, wealth maximization principle, critical legal studies
The Adoption of Network Goods: Evidence from the Spread of Mobile Phones in Rwanda

This article develops a method to estimate and simulate the adoption of a network good. I estimate demand for mobile phones as a function of individuals’ social networks, coverage, and prices, using transaction data from nearly the entire network of Rwandan mobile phone subscribers at the time, over 4.5 years. I estimate the utility of adopting a phone based on its eventual usage: subscribers pay on the margin, so calls reveal the value of communicating with each contact. I use this structural model to simulate the effects of two policies. A requirement to serve rural areas lowered operator profits but increased net social welfare. Developing countries heavily tax mobile phones, but standard metrics that neglect network effects grossly understate the true welfare cost in a growing network, which is up to 3.12 times the revenue raised. Shifting from handset to usage taxes would have increased the surplus of poorer users by at least 26%.
Enhancing Regulatory Decision Making for Postmarket Drug Safety

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the approval and safe public use of pharmaceutical products in the United States. The FDA uses postmarket surveillance systems to monitor drugs...
Enabling Large-Scale Deliberation Using Attention-Mediation Metrics

Humanity now finds itself faced with a range of highly complex and controversial challenges--such as climate change, the spread of disease, international security, scientific collaborations, product development, and so on--that call upon us to bring together large numbers of experts and stakeholders to deliberate collectively on a global scale. Collocated meetings can however be impractically expensive, severely limit the concurrency and thus breadth of interaction, and are prone to serious dysfunctions such as polarization and hidden profiles. Social media such as email, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, and web forums provide unprecedented opportunities for interacting on a massive scale, but have yet to realize their potential for helping people deliberate effectively, typically generating poorly-organized, unsystematic and highly redundant contributions of widely varying quality. Large-scale argumentation systems represent a promising approach for addressing these challenges, by virtue of providing a simple systematic structure that radically reduces redundancy and encourages clarity. They do, however, raise an important challenge. How can we ensure that the attention of the deliberation participants is drawn, especially in large complex argument maps, to where it can best serve the goals of the deliberation? How can users, for example, find the issues they can best contribute to, assess whether some intervention is needed, or identify the results that are mature and ready to "harvest"? Can we enable, for large-scale distributed discussions, the ready understanding that participants typically have about the progress and needs of small-scale, collocated discussions?. This paper will address these important questions, discussing (1) the strengths and limitations of current deliberation technologies, (2) how argumentation technology can help address these limitations, and (3) how we can use attention-mediation metrics to enhance the effectiveness of large-scale argumentation-based deliberations.
Measuring the gains from trade under monopolistic competition

Three sources of gains from trade under monopolistic competition are (i) new import varieties available to consumers; (ii) enhanced efficiency as more productive firms begin exporting and less productive firms exit; (iii) reduced markups charged by firms due to import competition. The first source of gains can be measured as new goods in a CES utility function for consumers. We argue that the second source is formally analogous to the producer gain from new goods, with a constant-elasticity transformation curve for the economy. We suggest that the third source of gain can be measured using a translog expenditure function for consumers, which, in contrast to the CES case, allows for finite reservation prices for new goods and endogenous markups.
Assets in Place, Growth Opportunities, and IPO Returns

We consider a simple model positing that initial public offering price is equal to the present value of an entity's assets in place and growth opportunities. The model predicts that initial return is positively related to both the size and risk of growth opportunities. Consistent with this prediction, we find initial return to be positively related to both the fraction of the offer price that is accounted for by the present value of growth opportunities and various proxies of issue uncertainty. We also find that IPO investors equate one dollar of growth opportunities to approximately three quarters of tangible assets.
Too Many Products: Decentralized Decision Making in Multinational Firms

I analyze country-level product ranges offered by multinational laundry detergent manufacturers in Western Europe. Observed product range variation across countries exceeds the optimal firm-level response to differences in consumer preferences and retail environments. Counterfactual analysis reveals that increased product range standardization would reduce firm costs and increase profits. These findings are consistent with theory models of local agency, where decentralized decision making can be the constrained optimal organizational form despite the resulting lack of coordination across divisions. My analysis suggests that organizational structure affects product market outcomes and firm performance.
The Post-Postcolonial Woman or Child

This essay is based on remarks given as Distinguished Discussant for the 16th annual Grotius Lecture at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law/Biennial Conference of the International Law Association. The essay examines the international law status of women, on the one hand, and children, on the other, through the contemporary lens of the post-postcolonial world and the historical lens of Hugo Grotius and the colonialist era. In so doing, the essay responds to the principal Grotius Lecture, "Women and Children: The Cutting Edge of International Law," which was delivered by Radhika Coomarswamy, NYU Global Professor of Law and former Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General on Children & Armed Conflict and U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women.