cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Why do people keep their promises? A further investigation

Two rationales have emerged for why individuals keep their promises: (a) an emotional commitment to keep actions and words consistent, a commitment rationale and (b) avoidance of guilt due to not meeting the expectations of the promisee, an expectations rationale. We propose a new dichotomy with clearer distinctions between rationales: (1) an internal consistency rationale, which is the desire to keep actions and words consistent regardless of others’ awareness of the promise and (2) a communication rationale, which captures all aspects of promise keeping that are associated with the promisee having learned of the promise, including but not limited to promisee expectations. Using an experiment that manipulates whether promises are delivered, we find no support for the internal consistency rationale; only delivered promises are relevant. In a second experiment designed to better understand what aspect of promise delivery influences promisor behavior, we manipulate whether the promise is delivered before or after the promisee is able to take a trusting action. We find late-arriving promises are relevant though not as relevant as promises delivered before the promisee chooses whether to take the trusting action. We conclude that implicit contracting does not fully explain promise keeping, because had it done so, late-arriving promises would also be irrelevant.
Capital structure with risky foreign investment.

Abstract Firms facing significant business risks have incentives to mitigate the costs of these risks by adjusting their capital structures. This paper investigates this link by analyzing the exposures of multinational firms to political risk. The evidence indicates that returns on investment in politically risky countries are more volatile than returns elsewhere. Multinational firms reduce their leverage in response to these political risks: a one standard deviation increase in foreign political risk is associated with 3.5% reduced leverage. The effect of foreign political risks on leverage is most pronounced for firms in industries whose returns are most susceptible to political influence.
The role of factoring for financing small and medium enterprises

Around the world, factoring is a growing source of external financing for corporations and small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). What is unique about factoring is that the credit provided by a lender is explicitly linked to the value of a supplier's accounts receivable and not the supplier's overall creditworthiness. Therefore, factoring allows high-risk suppliers to transfer their credit risk to their high-quality buyers. Factoring may be particularly useful in countries with weak judicial enforcement and imperfect records of upholding seniority claims because receivables are sold, rather than collateralized, and factored receivables are not part of the estate of a bankrupt SME. Empirical tests find that factoring is larger in countries with greater economic development and growth and developed credit information bureaus. In addition, the author finds that creditor rights are not related to factoring. The author also discusses reverse factoring, which is a technology that can mitigate the problem of borrowers' informational opacity in business environments with weak information infrastructures if only receivables from high-quality buyers are factored. She illustrates the case of the Nafin reverse factoring program in Mexico and highlights how the use of electronic channels and a supportive legal and regulatory environment can cut costs and provide greater SME services in emerging markets.
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Financial Regulation: Case Studies and Implications

Some members of Congress, the D.C. Circuit, and legal academia are promoting a particular, abstract form of cost-benefit analysis for financial regulation: judicially enforced quantification. How would CBA work in practice, if applied to specific, important, representative rules, and what is the alternative? Detailed case studies of six rules – (1) disclosure rules under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, (2) the SEC’s mutual fund governance reforms, (3) Basel III’s heightened capital requirements for banks, (4) the Volcker Rule, (5) the SEC’s cross-border swap proposals and (6) the FSA’s mortgage reforms – finds that precise, reliable, quantified CBA remains unfeasible. Quantified CBA of such rules can be no more than “guesstimated,” as it entails (a) causal inferences that are unreliable under standard regulatory conditions; (b) using problematic data, and/or (c) the same contestable, assumption-sensitive macroeconomic and/or political modeling used to make monetary policy, which even CBA advocates would exempt from CBA law. Expert judgment remains an inevitable part even of what advocates label “gold-standard” quantified CBA, because finance is central to the economy, is social and political, and is non-stationary. Judicial review of quantified CBA can be expected to do more to camouflage discretionary choices than to discipline agencies or promote democracy.
Speechless: The Silencing of Criminal Defendants

Over one million defendants pass through the criminal justice system every year, yet we almost never hear from them. From the first Miranda warnings, through trial or guilty plea, and finally at sentencing, most defendants remain silent, spoken for by their lawyers or not at all. The criminal system treats this pervasive silencing as protective, a victory for defendants. This Article argues that it is also a massive democratic and human failure. Our democracy prizes individual speech as the main antidote to governmental tyranny, yet it silences the millions of poor, socially-disadvantaged individuals who directly face the coercive power of the state. Speech also has important cognitive and dignitary functions: it is through speech that defendants engage with the law, understand it, express anger, remorse, or their acceptance or rejection of the process. Since defendants speak so rarely, however, these speech functions too often go unfulfilled. Finally, silencing excludes defendants from the social narratives that shape the criminal justice system itself, in which society ultimately decides what collective decisions are fair or unfair, and who should be punished. This Article describes the silencing phenomenon in practice and doctrine, and identifies the many unrecognized harms that silence causes to individual defendants, to the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and to democratic values that underlie the process. It proposes new ways of valuing defendant speech, and challenges conventional understandings of the attorney-client conversation, the listening role of the bench, and the public discourse about criminal justice.
Rethinking Civil-Law Taxonomy: Persons, Things, and the Problem of Domat’s Monster

Since the time of Gaius, the civil law has been based on a fundamental structure, which divides private law conceptually between persons, things, and actions (or more recently obligations). This is usually viewed as creating a closed system into which any private-law matter must by definition fit. It leads, however, to a view of legal categories as bounded boxes, and of legal taxonomy as a process of making either/or decisions about where something fits. This article rethinks civil-law taxonomy by focusing on the boundaries or interfaces between conceptual categories rather than on defining the concepts themselves. It argues that the three civil-law categories of persons, things, and obligations are in dynamic interaction with each other, a rhetorical and normative process through which each category influences and inflects the others. Classificatory problems – particularly cases that fall between the categories of persons and things, such as human body parts or the right to privacy-change in useful ways if we view classification not as placing things on one side or the other of a clear line, but as weighing and assessing the mingling of different concepts. Blurring of boundaries should thus not be understood as a failure of taxonomy, but rather as an admission that the richness of human experience cannot be reduced to a series of either/or choices.
Un)appealing Deference to the Tax Court

The U.S. Tax Court (Tax Court), which hears the vast majority of litigated federal tax cases, occupies an unusual place in the federal government. It is a federal court located outside of the judicial branch, but its decisions are appealable to the federal courts of appeals. This odd structure, coupled with the court’s history as an independent agency in the executive branch, can give rise to important questions, such as the standard of review that should apply to its decisions. In particular, should the courts of appeals treat Tax Court decisions the same as those of district courts in tax cases, or should they apply a more deferential standard analogous to review of agency decisions, as the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1943 in Dobson v. Commissioner? Answering the standard-of-review question implicates issues of both law and policy. Contrary to some scholarship, this Article argues that, as a doctrinal matter, no vestige of the Dobson rule remains and that courts of appeals must apply the same standard of judicial review that they apply to district courts in nonjury cases. The Article further argues that appellate review theory supports that result. The Dobson rule was a largely instrumental one designed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson to reduce the volume of tax litigation. Although tax litigation is unusually decentralized and the Tax Court has unique expertise, those differences do not support departing from the policies underlying appellate review. Appellate courts therefore Copyright © 2014 Leandra Lederman. † William W. Oliver Professor of Tax Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, IN. The author is grateful for helpful comments and feedback on early drafts provided by Charlie Geyh, Susie Morse, David Schizer, Andre Smith, and Christopher Walker; the symposium participants, particularly discussant Keith Fogg; participants in a Duke University School of Law Tax Policy Seminar, including Gregg Polsky, Rich Schmalbeck, Kathleen Thomas, and Larry Zelenak; participants in a Harvard University Tax Law & Policy Seminar, including Joe Bankman, Michael Graetz, Dan Shaviro, and Al Warren; participants in a University of Toronto Faculty of Law James Hausman Tax Law & Policy Workshop, including Benjamin Alarie and Emily Satterthwaite; and Lisa Bernstein and other participants in a University of Chicago School of Law Legal Scholarship Workshop. Karun Ahuja, Jonathon Chaklos, Joseph Dugan, and Sherry Lin provided valuable research assistance. LEDERMAN FINAL (DO NOT DELETE) 4/21/2014 9:16 AM 1836 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 63:1835 should not defer to the interpretations of the Tax Court any more than they do to those of the district courts.
Using Litigation to Make Public Health Policy: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges in Assessing Product Liability, Tobacco, and Gun Litigation

In the debate over the use of litigation to make public health policy, proponents and critics of the litigation disagree over the proper role of courts in policy making. Proponents assert that courts have an essential role to play alongside legislatures and administrative agencies in making public policy. They point to the failure of legislatures and agencies to regulate product safety, tobacco, and guns more aggressively as justification for a policy making role for courts. Critics insist that the job of courts is to resolve private disputes and to enforce legislative mandates, not to make public policy. Judges, they argue, make poor policy makers because they lack both the necessary tools and the democratic credentials of legislatures and agencies. Using the courts to make public policy will, in the end, critics suggest, politicize the judiciary, undermine the integrity of the litigation process, and erode public confidence in the courts. This article examines these arguments and argues that (1) the two sides rely on competing ideals of the proper role of courts drawn from constitutional law, both of which are inapposite to the traditional policy making role of courts in the context of civil litigation; and (2) the central arguments of each side require further theoretical elaboration and empirical support.
A Positive Theory of Network Connectivity

In this paper we develop a positive theory of network connectivity, seeking to provide the microfoundations of alternative network topologies as the result of self-interested actors. By building roads, landowners hope to increase their parcels' accessibility and economic value. A simulation model is performed on a grid-like land-use layer with a downtown in the center. The degree to which the networks are tree-like is evaluated. This research posits that road networks experience an evolutionary process where a tree-like structure first emerges around the centered parcel before the network pushes outward to the periphery. Road network topology becomes increasingly connected as the accessibility value of reaching other parcels increases. The results demonstrate that, even without a centralized authority, road networks can display the property of self-organization and evolution, and that, in the absence of intervention, the degree to which a network structure is tree-like or web-like results from the underly...
Analyst Optimism and Incentives under Market Uncertainty

We examine how analysts’ changing incentives driven by changes in market uncertainty affect their forecast optimism. Analysts issue more optimistically biased earnings forecasts and buy recommendations under high market uncertainty (VIX). The lower reputational costs and larger benefits of optimistic output explain the increased optimistic output: Analysts are less likely to be penalized for inaccuracy and can stimulate more trading activity from optimistically biased output when market uncertainty is high. We find that the likelihood of analysts’ turnover decreases, while the trading volume associated with optimistic output increases, with VIX. No evidence suggests that analysts’ self-selection affects our findings on optimism and market uncertainty.
Public Sector Pay and Corruption: Measuring Bribery from Micro Data *

Abstract This study provides the first systematic measure of bribery using micro-level data on reported earnings, household spending and asset holdings. We use the compensating differential framework and the estimated sectoral gap in reported earnings and expenditures to identify the size of unobserved (unofficial) compensation (i.e., bribes) of public sector employees. In the case of Ukraine, we find that public sector employees receive 24–32% less wages than their private sector counterparts. The gap is particularly large at the top of the wage distribution. At the same time, workers in both sectors have essentially identical level of consumer expenditures and asset holdings that unambiguously indicate the presence of non-reported compensation in the public sector. Using the conditions of labor market equilibrium, we develop an aggregate measure of bribery and find that the lower bound estimate of the extent of bribery in Ukraine is between 460 million and 580 million U.S. dollars (0.9–1.2% of Ukraine's GDP in 2003).
The Internal and External Impact of Historical Designation on Property Values

Designation of historic properties and historic districts is increasingly used as a means to revive central-city neighborhoods and to promote urban economic development. While preservation activities are thought to generate positive externalities for surrounding neighborhoods, these external effects have been difficult to quantify. Using a database of tax-appraisal records for residential properties in Abilene, Texas, this study demonstrates that there are significant, positive externalities associated with historic designation. We perform simple cost-benefit calculations and find that the internal and external benefits more than outweigh the (nonzero) costs associated with historical designation. Moreover, from the city of Abilene's perspective the property-tax incentives provided to historic reinvestment are outweighed by the added property-tax revenue created by the increased value.
Private Commercial Law in the Cotton Industry: Creating Cooperation Through Rules, Norms, and Institutions

The cotton industry has almost entirely opted out of the public legal system, replacing it with one of the oldest and most complex systems of private commercial law.1 Most contracts for the purchase and sale of domestic cotton, between merchants or between merchants and mills, are neither consummated under the Uniform Commercial Code ("Code") nor interpreted and enforced in court when disputes arise. Rather, most such contracts are concluded under one of several privately drafted sets of contract default rules and are subject to arbitration in one of several merchant tribunals. Similarly, most international sales of cotton are governed neither by state-supplied legal rules nor
Worms: Education and health externalities in kenya

Intestinal helminths - including hookworm roundworm schistosomiasis and whipworm - infect more than one-quarter of the worlds population. A randomized evaluation of a project in Kenya suggests that school-based mass treatment with deworming drugs reduced school absenteeism in treatment schools by one quarter gains are especially large among the youngest children. Deworming is found to be cheaper than alternative ways of boosting school participation. By reducing disease transmission deworming creates substantial externality health and school participation benefits among untreated children in the treatment schools and among children in neighboring schools. These externalities are large enough to justify fully subsidizing treatment. We do not find evidence that deworming improves academic test scores. Existing experimental studies in which treatment is randomized among individuals in the same school find small and insignificant deworming treatment effects on education; however these studies underestimate true treatment effects if deworming creates positive externalities for the control group and reduces treatment group attrition. (authors)
Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation

This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross-sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.
Discovery of actionable patterns in databases: the action hierarchy approach

An approach to defining actionability as a measure of interestingness of patterns is proposed. This approach is based on the concept of an action hierarchy which is defined as a tree of actions with patterns and pattern templates (data mining queries) assigned to its nodes. A method for discovering actionable patterns is presented and various techniques for optimizing the discovery process are proposed.
Multiple Constraints and Hicksian Complementarity: A Generalization and an Application to Portfolio Choice

Ian Steedman (Consumption Takes Time: Implications for Economic Theory, Routledge, London, 2001) has shown, among other things, that when a household chooses amounts of time to allocate to competing consumption activities subject to both a money income constraint and a time constraint, at least two consumption activities must have at least one compensated complement each. This paper generalizes Steedman's result in several directions and uses the generalized version to study compensated complementarity among state–dependent consumption levels and asset purchases in a model of portfolio choice under uncertainty.
Regulating Capital Flows to Emerging Markets: An Externality View

Abstract We show that capital flows to emerging market economies create externalities that differ by an order of magnitude depending on the state-contingent payoff profile of the flows. Those with pro-cyclical payoffs, such as foreign currency debt, generate substantial negative pecuniary externalities because they lead to large repayments and contractionary exchange rate depreciations during financial crises. Conversely, capital flows with an insurance component, such as FDI or equity, are largely benign. We construct an externality pricing kernel and use sufficient statistics and DSGE model simulations to quantify the externalities that materialized during past financial crises. We find stark differences depending on the payoff profile, justifying taxes of up to 3% for dollar debt but close to zero for FDI. These findings contrast with the existing literature, which has suggested that policymakers should focus on reducing over-borrowing rather than changing the composition of external liabilities.
The private-search doctrine does not exist

This Article advances the novel argument that there is no such thing as the Fourth Amendment’s private-search doctrine. For nearly four decades, courts have invoked the doctrine to permit police to replicate, without a warrant, a prior search performed by a private third party. This Article contends that the doctrine rests on a fundamental misreading of the Supreme Court’s seminal precedents and an untenable theory of Fourth Amendment privacy. The Supreme Court has never announced a “private-search doctrine.” It has addressed the fact pattern of private searches only twice, and not since 1984. The opinions in those two cases, Walter v. United States and United States v. Jacobsen, are notoriously unsettling and hard to judge. Yet courts and commentators have long interpreted those cases as holding that Fourth Amendment privacy is vitiated by the exposure of information to third parties, even when that exposure is the result of an unforeseeable and surreptitious search. Uncertainty over the bounds of the doctrine has resulted in the development of drastically different approaches to private searches, recently culminating in a federal circuit split. Performing a close examination of the Walter and Jacobsen opinions, this Article demonstrates that those cases are best understood not as announcing a new Fourth Amendment doctrine—the private-search doctrine—but rather as extending an existing exception—the single-purpose container doctrine—into a new factual context. Correcting this decades-old mistake harmonizes many of the intuitions of lower courts regarding private searches while simultaneously resolving two circuit splits: the split over the private-search doctrine and a longstanding split over the application of the single-purpose container doctrine. Perhaps more importantly, this correction also sheds new light on the nature of Fourth Amendment privacy and the normative arguments for its protection.
Multilevel topological interference management

The robust principles of treating interference as noise (TIN) when it is sufficiently weak, and avoiding it when it is not, form the background for this work. Combining TIN with the topological interference management (TIM) framework that identifies optimal interference avoidance schemes, a baseline TIM-TIN approach is proposed which decomposes a network into TIN and TIM components, allocates the signal power levels to each user in the TIN component, allocates signal vector space dimensions to each user in the TIM component, and guarantees that the product of the two is an achievable number of signal dimensions available to each user in the original network.
Legitimacy, Adaptation and Resilience in Ecosystem Management

Ecologists have made great strides in developing criteria for describing the resilience of an ecological system. In addition, expansion of that effort to social-ecological systems has begun the process of identifying changes to the social system necessary to foster resilience in an ecological system such as the use of adaptive management and integrated water resource management. But what of the social system itself? Can a social system be considered resilient if it fosters ecological resilience while ignoring equity and justice in the social system? More importantly, will changes to governance needed to foster ecosystem resilience be possible without careful attention to equity and justice in designing those changes? This paper uses the concept of legitimacy in governance as a necessary component of resilience in the social system and will turn to network theory as a means to facilitate integrated water resource management. Using work on the type of adaptive management/governance and integration across management authorities required to foster ecological system resilience, the paper will discuss means to delegate more flexible, adaptive and integrated authority to water management entities, while retaining legitimacy in governance.
The cost of complying with human rights treaties: The convention on the rights of the child and basic immunization

The determinants of compliance with human rights treaties likely vary according to the right in question, yet heterogeneity in the pathways through which ratification affects various human rights outcomes has received limited attention. This paper first develops an account of treaty compliance that incorporates the intrinsic benefits to the state of compliance, regime costs associated with certain rights, the political costs that NGOs, judges, and others are able to impose for non-compliance, and the fiscal and economic costs of compliance. The paper argues that for child survival rights, fiscal and economic costs are likely to be dispositive, and that as a result richer countries are more likely to comply. The paper then uses an instrumental variable approach to investigate whether ratification of the Convention of the Rights of the Child was associated with stronger effort at the country level on child survival rights. It finds that ratification of the CRC was correlated with a subsequent increase in immunization rates, but only in upper middle and high income countries.
Management of an annual fishery in the presence of ecological stress: The case of shrimp and hypoxia

The emergence of ecosystem-based management suggests that traditional fisheries management and protection of environmental quality are increasingly interrelated. Fishery managers, however, have limited control over most sources of marine and estuarine pollution and at best can only adapt to environmental conditions. We develop a bioeconomic model of optimal harvest of an annual species that is subject to an environmental disturbance. We parameterize the model to analyze the effect of hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) on the optimal harvest path of brown shrimp, a commercially important species that is fished in hypoxic waters in the Gulf of Mexico and in estuaries in the southeastern United States. We find that hypoxia alters the qualitative pattern of optimal harvest and shifts the season opening earlier in the year; more severe hypoxia leads to even earlier season openings. Failure to adapt to hypoxia leads to greater losses when the effects of hypoxia are more severe. However, rent gains from adapting fishery management to hypoxia are relatively small compared to rent losses from the hypoxia effect itself. This suggests that it is critical for other regulatory agencies to control estuarine pollution, and fishery managers need to generate value from the fishery resources through other means such as rationalization.
Decomposing Changes in Deferred Tax Assets and Liabilities to Isolate Earnings Management Activities

This paper provides evidence on the types of accounts that reveal earnings management activities. We build on Burgstahler and Dichev's (1997) evidence of earnings management to avoid an earnings decline and Phillips et al.'s (2003) findings that deferred tax expense (DTE) can be used to detect such earnings management. In particular, we investigate the relation between changes in annual earnings and changes in deferred tax asset and liability components using data hand‐collected from firms' income tax footnote disclosures. Our evidence indicates that changes in the net deferred tax liability (DTL) component related to revenue and expense accruals and reserves can be used to detect earnings management to avoid an earnings decline. In addition, we build on Joos et al.'s (2003) results and partition our sample into firm‐years with positive and negative changes in net DTLs and repeat our analyses. In contrast to the Joos et al. (2003) finding that DTE can be used to detect earnings management only for firm‐ye...
New evidence on earnings and benefit claims following changes in the retirement earnings test in 2000

Abstract This paper examines the labor force activity and timing of benefit claims of workers aged 65–69 in response to the removal of the retirement earnings test in 2000. We use the 1% sample of longitudinal Social Security administrative data that covers the period from 4 years before to 4 years after the removal of the test. Using a reduced-form quantile regression method, we find that effects on earnings are limited to workers with earnings just around the test threshold and above, as predicted by economic theory. Our estimated effects suggest that labor supply elasticities with respect to the net-of-tax rate are approximately 0.05–0.07 for working primary beneficiaries aged 65–69 whose earnings are between the median and the 80th percentile. Further, results show that applications for Social Security benefits following the earnings test removal accelerated by 2 to 5 percentage points among individuals aged 65–69 and by 3 to 7 percentage points among those reaching age 65.
Time preference, time discounting, and smoking decisions

This study examines the relationship between time discounting, other sources of time preference, and choices about smoking. Using a survey fielded for our analysis, we elicit rates of time discount from choices in financial and health domains. We also examine the relationship between other determinants of time preference and smoking status. We find very high rates of time discount in the financial realm for a horizon of 1 year, irrespective of smoking status. In the health domain, the implied rates of time discount decline with the length of the time delay (hyperbolic discounting) and the sign of the payoff (the sign effect). We use a series of questions about the willingness to undergo a colonoscopy to elicit short- and long-run rates of discount in a quasi-hyperbolic discounting framework, finding no evidence that short-run and long-run rates of discount differ by smoking status. Using more general measures of time preference, i.e., impulsivity and length of financial planning horizon, smokers are more impatient. However, neither of these measures is significantly correlated with the measures of time discounting. Our results indicate that subjective rates of time discount revealed through committed choice scenarios are not related to differences in smoking behavior. Rather, a combination of more general measures of time preference and self-control, i.e., impulsivity and financial planning, are more closely related to the smoking decision.
Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina

Abstract For a three-year time period beginning in 2001, North Carolina awarded an annual bonus of $1800 to certified math, science and special education teachers working in public secondary schools with either high-poverty rates or low test scores. Using longitudinal data on teachers, we estimate hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program's implementation, across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers, and across eligible and barely-ineligible schools. Results suggest that this bonus payment was sufficient to reduce mean turnover rates of the targeted teachers by 17%. Experienced teachers exhibited the strongest response to the program. Finally, the effect of the program may have been at least partly undermined by the state's failure to fully educate teachers regarding the eligibility criteria. Our estimates most likely underpredict the potential outcome of a program of permanent salary differentials operating under complete information.
Financial buyers in Takeovers: focus on cost efficiency

This paper examines whether financial buyers are more likely to initiate takeovers of inefficient firms. We show that they indeed are and thus conclude that takeovers by financial buyers play a potentially beneficial role in the allocation of corporate assets in the US. economy. Our analysis of determinants of takeovers initiated by financial buyers uses an application of the methodology developed in Trimbath, Frydman and Frydman (2001). In order to illustrate efficiency enhancements introduced by financial buyers, we select Forstmann Little’s acquisition of General Instrument for a brief case study. We show that their aggressive programs of cost management substantially improved the efficiency of General Instrument. Moreover, it allowed General Instrument to expand research and development to become the global leader in high definition television.
Problems with Destination-Based Corporate Taxes and the Ryan Blueprint

With the election of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s domination of Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s blueprint for fundamental tax reform requires more careful analysis. The Ryan blueprint combines reduced individual rates with a destination-based cash flow type business tax applicable to all businesses. The destination-based business tax at the center of the blueprint has several major problems: It is incompatible with our WTO obligations, it is incompatible with our tax treaties, and it will not eliminate the problems of income shifting and inversions it is designed to address. In addition, these proposals generate vexing technical problems that are not easily fixed as well as significant political problems. Finally, due to the tax rates that have been proposed, the plan is likely to generate large revenue losses and a less progressive tax system. We conclude by recommending better tax policy solutions to our current corporate tax problems.
Dispelling myths about a new healthful food can be more motivating than promoting nutritional benefits: the case of Tofu.

Abstract Objective This study examines what factors impact the adoption of certain types of healthy foods, such as Tofu, by future nutritional gatekeepers. Design Information on perceived facilitators and barriers to the utilization of barriers would be obtained via interviews and surveys. Setting In-depth laddering interviews and an online survey during 2012 were utilized. Subjects The in-depth laddering interviews were conducted with 83 young women and new mothers (non-vegetarians and non-Asians) who were enthusiastic lovers of Tofu. 502 women from the target demographic (between 20 and 35, non-Asian) were recruited from a national panel and surveyed online in 2012. Results Based on the interviews, 21 primary reasons for trying Tofu (facilitators) and 10 reasons that might be preventative (barriers) were identified. A key finding was that facilitators were not motivating factors for why women adopted Tofu into their diets. Instead, barriers explained more than 44% of the variance for not adopting tofu. Conclusions When encouraging nutritional gatekeepers to add Tofu to their household diets, it may be more effective to focus on changing the barriers. This study suggests that nutritionists and health practitioners may be more successful in encouraging the adoption of healthy new foods by dispelling their misconceptions rather than focusing on their nutritional benefits.
Reflections on the Indictment of Sitting Heads of State and Government and Its Consequences for Peace and Stability and Reconciliation in Africa

AbstractIn these remarks, the author considers the most recent challenge to the application of international criminal justice in Africa: Kenya’s controversial November 2013 proposal to amend the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to temporarily exempt from prosecution sitting presidents accused of involvement with international crimes. He examines several legal and practical reasons why such a proposal is untenable. Instead, citing the principle of complementarity and urging the principled use of judicial and prosecutorial discretion, he contends that much of the African Union’s current concerns about the Kenya Situation can be addressed within the confines of existing Rome Law. This is important because, even if it is possible for African countries to secure amendments to the Rules of Procedure and Evidence, African States Parties are unlikely able to secure the global consensus required to effect substantive amendments to the 1998 treaty. On the other hand, the author suggests that the International Criminal Court officials, especially the judges and the chief prosecutor, can help bridge the apparent gap between the Court and its African supporters. Towards that end, they should consider taking a more flexible and more nuanced approach to their interpretations and application of several important provisions contained in their founding statute. Eschewing a one-size fits all approach, it is submitted that each African situation is unique – both in the scope of the problem, and in the solution required in the necessary fight against impunity in Africa.
On the Redistributive Property of Budget Deficits

The rapid accumulation of public debt in most industrialized economies since 1973 has challenged economists to ask themselves again why and when a government runs a budget deficit. Barro's public debt theory (1979) argues that public debt should be countercyclical. Since taxes are distortionary, it is optimal to keep their excess burden constant over time and this implies running budget deficits during recessions and budget surpluses during expansions. However, most industrialized economies run large and persistent primary deficits from 1973 to the early 1990s, encompassing several peaks and troughs of the business cycle.
The Real Social Security Disability Fraud(s)

In early 2014, the Manhattan District Attorney announced indictments in one of the largest Social Security Disability (SSD) fraud schemes to have taken place to date. Most of the fraudulent claimants were former New York City (NYC) police officers and fire fighters, many of whom alleged mental disabilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their involvement in responding to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. However, the claimants' allegations of disability were belied by the lives that they led, often documented by photographs of the claimants boating, skiing, and surfing posted on their Facebook pages. The fraud happened at a time of already great concern over the fiscal solvency of the SSD system. Current estimates have the system becoming insolvent within 3 or 4 years, unlike the more frequently discussed Social Security Retirement and Medicare systems, both of which are projected to remain solvent for at least a couple of more decades into the future.The day after the indictments were announced, Social Security Administrative Law Judge D. Randall Frye, who is President of the Association of Administrative Law Judges, published an editorial in the New York Times, advocating changes to the SSD system that he claimed would reduce the incidence of fraud and would help the fiscal solvency of the system. Frye’s primary recommendation was to replace SSD's "inquisitorial" hearing system with a full-blown adversary adjudication system.Taken together, coverage of the NYC fraud scheme, concerns about the fiscal solvency of the SSD system, and Judge Frye's arguments, perpetrate a number of frauds or falsehoods about the SSD system. A major purpose of this article is to rebut three of those frauds: (1) that it is too easy to get SSD benefits; (2) that an adversarial adjudicatory system would improve SSD outcomes; and (3) that the SSD system makes reliable determinations regarding SSD claimants' ability to work. In addition to relying on published data and literature, the article relies on the case of a recent homeless veteran's efforts to obtain SSD benefits to support its arguments.Though rebutting the first two frauds mentioned above does not call for any major reforms to the current system, rebutting the third fraud does. Thus, this article goes on to recommend scrapping the vocational aspects of the current SSD system, in favor of a new system that would combine vocational training and placement services, and income support, in an effort both to ensure the fiscal solvency of the SSD system, and to provide better assistance to the victims of fundamental economic change and dislocation.
Resolution and Kinematics of Molecular Gas Surrounding the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.6 Using the Gravitational Lens

Gravitational lenses have long been advertised as primitive telescopes, capable of magnifying cosmologically distant sources. In this Letter we present new, 09 resolution CO (7-6) observations of the z = 2.56 Cloverleaf quasar (H1413+117) and spatially resolved images. By modeling the gravitational lens, we infer a size scale of 03 (~1 kpc) for the molecular gas structure surrounding the quasar, and the gas has a kinematic structure roughly consistent with a rotating disk. The observed properties of the CO-emitting gas are similar to the nuclear starburst complexes found in the infrared luminous galaxies in the local universe, and metal enrichment by vigorous star formation within this massive nuclear gas complex can explain the abundance of carbon and oxygen in the interstellar medium of this system observed when the universe was only a few billion years old. Obtaining corresponding details in an unlensed object at similar distances would be well beyond the reach of current instruments, and this study highlights the less exploited yet powerful use of a gravitational lens as a natural telescope.
A Return to Old-Time Religion? The Glass-Steagall Act, the Volcker Rule, Limits on Proprietary Trading, and Sustainability

Pursuant to directions contained in the Dodd-Frank Act (2010), five federal agencies collaborated to produce a 983 page rule limiting proprietary trading by financial institutions (the Volcker Rule, which becomes effective in summer, 2015). The Volcker Rule limits proprietary trading to no more than 3 percent of “Tier One” assets. The hoped for effects are that financial institutions will be strictly limited in trading for their own accounts. Some say, propelled by unbridled greed, U.S. financial institutions borrowed excessive amounts of money, inflating leverage ratios as high as 36 or 40 to 1, using the borrowed funds to engage in proprietary trading. When returns on those investments decreased due to the real estate crisis, most financial firms could not de-leverage fast enough. Three of the “Big Five” effectively failed as did Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac as well as others. This article reviews the history from the early 1930s to the present day. It parses the Volcker Rule, making clear that the Volcker Rule stops far short of re-instituting a Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking. The last question, asked but not answered, is should Congress re-enact such a separation, as Senators Elizabeth Warren and John McCain have urged? Or is the Volcker Rule sufficient to revive the milieu when bankers and brokers concentrated on making money for their clients rather than concentrating on making money for themselves.
Explaining Firm Emergence: Specialization, Transaction Costs, and the Integration Process

This article explains firm emergence and the role of firms in the market structure using the productive power of specialization. Based on productivity efficiencies through technological specialization, a model for firm emergence is drafted alongside Coasean transaction cost theory. I find that transaction costs cannot explain firm emergence, but the entrepreneurial specialization perspective here adopted provides a promising approach to understanding the firm's function to the entrepreneur and its internal organization and capabilities. It suggests a foundational framework for studying the creation of capabilities and the interplay between markets, firms, and entrepreneurs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Motivating Russian Workers: Analysis of Age and Gender Differences

Abstract What motivates Russians to work? Two hypotheses govern this analysis. First, worker motivation is positively correlated with organizational commitment, where organizational commitment is captured by a series of statements related to the employee’s perception of their workplace and the satisfaction expressed about the workplace and job. Second, worker motivation is positively correlated to the expectation that a desired reward will be received in exchange for doing the job well. Using survey data collected in May/June 2000 from 1200 employees in three regions of Russia, this paper: (1) documents the nature and scope of organizational commitment among Russian workers as the transition process draws to a close; (2) identifies the relative importance of select job motivators, as well as the expectation that these motivators will be received in exchange for a job well done; and (3) analyzes the extent of gender and generational differences in organizational commitment and worker motivation. The results can be used not only to begin filling a gap in the motivation literature by extending previous analyses based on US workers, but also to inform Russian and foreign managers about monetary and non-monetary factors to include in designing an effective reward structure. The results also are suitable for use in management training programs in Russia and elsewhere which focus on developing ways to construct more effective teamwork at the workplace.
Gideon at Guantánamo: Democratic and Despotic Detention

One measure of Gideon v. Wainwright is that it made the U.S. government's efforts to isolate 9/11 detainees from all outsiders at Guantanamo Bay conceptually and legally unsustainable. Gideon, along with Miranda v. Arizona, is part of a democratic narrative shaped over decades to insist that, unlike totalitarian regimes, the United States has constitutional obligations to equip individuals with third parties—lawyers—to inhibit (if not to prevent) coercion. Both Gideon and Miranda recognize the relationship between the dignity of individuals in their encounter with the state and the legitimacy of state processes. Both decisions locate enforcement authority in courts. Both rely on lawyers, deployed as witnesses to interrogation and as advocates, and both impose obligations that, when necessary, governments subsidize lawyers. Conflicts in the post-9/11 era over the boundaries of Gideon and Miranda illuminate what is at stake: whether aspirations remain that detention and interrogation of individuals—even the reviled—could possibly merit the adjective "democratic" to reflect constitutional commitments that all persons are rights-bearers who cannot be left alone and subject to state power closed off from public oversight.