cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Extraterritorial Avoidance Actions: Lessons from Madoff

The Madoff case provided fertile ground for testing boundaries of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. This paper looks at one boundary-testing dispute that forced the SDNY District Court to assess the extraterritorial reach of rules governing recovery of fraudulent transfers. The trustee for the Madoff estate sought to recover property that had been transferred from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme to offshore feeder funds, which in turn transferred the property to customers located abroad. The SDNY court stopped the trustee. In its view, the trustee was seeking extraterritorial application of Section 550, that the text of this section does not overcome the presumption against extraterritoriality, and that the doctrine of comity counseled against extraterritorial application. In this paper, I argue that the court probably reached the wrong conclusion. Not only does the court’s decision create a loophole in avoidance actions and have other odd implications, but the Code itself points to the opposite conclusion.
The vanishing hand: the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism

Alfred Chandler’s portrayal of the managerial revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries does not extend well into the late twentieth century, when widespread vertical disintegration began replacing the classical multi-unit managerial enterprise. This paper attempts to explain the new economy in a manner consistent with Chandler by providing an enlarged theoretical account of industrial evolution. In this account, clusters of Chandlerian firms appeared as a temporary episode within a larger Smithian process of the division of labor.
Is Privately‐provided Electronic Money Next?

To survive, any new electronic money will need to provide some advantage to its users, such as lower transaction costs, increased privacy, a greater ability to avoid taxes, or a more stable value than its government-provided competitors. Any successful new money will have to overcome substantial barriers to entry, however. These barriers to entry occur primarily in the form of the costs of switching to a different means of payment and require an understanding of the role played by ‘network economics.’ Unless a substantial number of the individuals and businesses with whom a person trades use the same money, any new means of payment will have little value. A temptation facing government regulators will be to extend and expand regulations to apply to new means of payment and forms of money. A more productive role of governments is to attempt to protect their own money-creation franchises by minimising the advantages offered by privately-provided alternatives. Governments should enforce contracts and punish fraud while remaining vigilant with respect to inflation, keep tax rates low and protect the privacy of their citizens.
On the Relation between EGARCH Idiosyncratic Volatility and Expected Stock Returns

A spurious positive relation between exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (EGARCH) estimates of expected month t idiosyncratic volatility and month t stock returns arises when the month t return is included in estimation of model parameters. We illustrate via simulations that this look-ahead bias is problematic for empirically observed degrees of stock return skewness and typical monthly return time series lengths. Moreover, the empirical idiosyncratic risk-return relation becomes negligible when expected month t idiosyncratic volatility is estimated using returns only up to month t − 1.
Disagreement, Tastes, and Asset Prices

Abstract Standard asset pricing models assume that: (i) there is complete agreement among investors about probability distributions of future payoffs on assets; and (ii) investors choose asset holdings based solely on anticipated payoffs; that is, investment assets are not also consumption goods. Both assumptions are unrealistic. We provide a simple framework for studying how disagreement and tastes for assets as consumption goods can affect asset prices.
Why is PIN priced

Recent empirical work suggests that a proxy for the probability of informed trading (PIN) is an important determinant of the cross-section of average returns. This paper examines whether PIN is priced because of information asymmetry or because of other liquidity effects that are unrelated to information asymmetry. Our starting point is a model that decomposes PIN into two components, one related to asymmetric information and one related to illiquidity. In a two-pass Fama-MacBeth regression, we show that the PIN component related to asymmetric information is not priced, while the PINcomponent related to illiquidity is priced. We conclude, therefore, that liquidity effects unrelated to information asymmetry explain the relation between PIN and the cross-section of expected returns.
Regulatory techniques in consumer protection: A critique of European consumer contract law

This Article classifies the consumer protection techniques that European contract law employs into four categories: Mandatory arrangements; disclosure; regulation of entry to and exit from contract; and pro-buyer default rules and contract interpretation. It argues that these techniques are far less likely to succeed than advocates, including the European Commission, believe, and they may bring about unintended consequences and hurt consumers. The techniques and their limits are illustrated through a study of proposed Common European Sales Law (CESL). The Article argues that the ambitious pursuit of consumer protection goals is also likely to interfere with the other main goal of the European contract law: harmonizing the laws of member states, encouraging cross border trade, and improving consumer' access to markets.
Federal contributions to high-income school districts: the use of tax deductions for funding K-12 education

The federal role in education finance is commonly seen as compensatory. The federal government gives large sums of money to low-income schools and school districts through programs such as Title 1. Yet, this view of federal aid is based solely on direct educational expenditures. The federal government and state governments also support schools through tax deductions and tax credits for educational expenditures. These policies tend to benefit higher-income districts. Without incorporating tax policies into our assessment of federal contributions to schools we will vastly underestimate the federal role and vastly overestimate the progressive nature of federal aid to schools. As an example, the deductibility of state and local taxes from the federal income tax is a federal contribution to schools. An individual in the 28% federal income tax bracket, who pays US$1000 in deductible state and local taxes for schools may deduct the US$1000 from the taxable income and reduce his/her federal tax bill by US$280. Thus, of the US$1000 going to schools, the federal government pays US$280 and the individual pays US$720. This paper estimates the extent and distribution of this subsidy and asks how the price incentives created by the deductibility affect the distribution of education spending across school districts. We compare both the size and progressivity of this ‘indirect’ federal subsidy to direct federal aid to schools (Title 1, for example). We find that the deductability more than doubles the federal contribution to schools and is so regressive that, even in combination with direct federal programs, more federal funds go to high-income than to low-income school districts.
Does United States v. Windsor (The DOMA Case) Open the Door to Congressional Standing Rights

In rare cases, a president refuses to defend a statute based upon a belief that the statute is unconstitutional. The law is unclear whether either House of Congress has Article III standing to defend a statute that the president refuses to defend. In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court in 2013 addressed the onstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Obama Administration took the middle position of declining to defend DOMA, but still enforcing it, despite its view that the statute was unconstitutional to assist federal courts in reviewing the constitutionality of the statute. It was unclear whether an appeal was proper in the case once a district court held the statute was unconstitutional, and the Executive Branch essentially agreed with that decision. Applying both prudential standing principles and mandatory Article III standing rules, Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, recognized that the Executive Branch was an appropriate party on appeal because it continued to enforce the statute. Additionally, the majority acknowledged that briefs filed by House of Representatives leadership supporting the constitutionality of DOMA supplied the necessary adverseness in the case given the Executive's view that DOMA was unconstitutional. The majority did not fully resolve the thorny issue of Congressional standing in cases where a president refuses to enforce a federal statute. Justice Scalia, in his dissent, emphasized the almost exclusive role of the Executive Branch in defending federal laws under Article II, squarely rejected Congressional standing, and argued that no party had standing to appeal in Windsor because the Executive agreed with the district court's judgment holding Section 3 unconstitutional. By contrast, Justice Alito, in his dissent, would have expressly recognized the authority and standing of the leaders of either House to defend any federal statute that the president does not defend. Yet by acknowledging that Congressional participation could supply the necessary adverseness to litigate a case when the Executive Branch agrees with the challenger that a statute is unconstitutional, the Court's opinion in Windsor likely will pave the way for increased Congressional participation in unusual cases where the Executive Branch believes a statute is unconstitutional, but at least one House of Congress wishes to defend the statute's constitutionality.
Is the Grass Greener? Switching Costs and Geographic Proximity in the High Status Affiliations of Professional Baseball

Professional baseball operates a tiered system of talent development facilitated by alliances between Minor League Baseball (MiLB) clubs and higher status Major League Baseball (MLB) parent teams. This study applies management theory to advance the literature on MiLB demand modeling by proposing and testing a new set of demand determinants based on interorganizational alliance principles. Team executives at the AA level should be alert to the high cost of switching team alliances and of changing to a parent club in closer geographical proximity. At the AAA level, affiliation with a winning MLB club exerts a positive effect on AAA demand. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Property Rights Movement's Embrace of Intellectual Property: True Love or Doomed Relationship

Author(s): Menell, Peter S. | Abstract: The recent Supreme Court battle over the legal standard for permanent injunctions in patents cases (eBay v. MercExchange) marked an important new front in the Property Rights Movement's campaign to establish a strict and broad interpretation of property rights and their enforcement. This essay explores whether Professor Richard Epstein's embrace of intellectual property rights is likely to produce a durable marriage of traditional property rights theory and intellectual property protection or merely represents a fling that will not withstand divisive relational pressures. It shows that philosophical, functional, intellectual, and political tensions stand in the way of a stable or enduring relationship between advocates of strong and unyielding property rights and intellectual property owners. The need for dynamism and adaptability within the intellectual property rights field may well weaken the support for absolutism in property jurisprudence and policy, reinforcing the shift away from the Blackstonian conception of property.
How Much “Law” in Legal Studies? Approaches to Teaching Legal Research and Doctrinal Analysis in a Legal Studies Program

This article addresses the teaching of legal research methods and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies program. I argue that learning about legal research and doctrinal analysis is an important element of legal education outside professional law schools. I start by considering the ongoing debate concerning the role of legal education both inside and outside professional law schools. I then describe the way in which the research methods courses offered by the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University attempt to reconcile the tension between “law” and legal studies. In particular, I focus on how the second-year research methods course introduces students to “traditional” legal research and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies context by deploying a number of pedagogical strategies. In so doing, the course provides students with an important foundation that allows them to embrace the multiple roles of legal education outside professional law schools. Resume: Cet article examine le role de l’enseignement des methodes de recherche juridique et de l’analyse des doctrines au sein d’un programme d’etudes juridiques. Je soutiens que la recherche juridique et l’analyse doctrinale representent des elements importants d’une formation juridique a l’exterieur des ecoles professionnelles de droit. Premierement, j’examine le debat en cours sur le role de l’education juridique a l’interieur et a l’exterieur des ecoles professionnelles de droit. Par la suite, je demontre comment les cours de recherche juridique offerts par le Departement d’etudes juridiques de l’Universite Carleton tentent de concilier la tension entre le « droit » et les etudes juridiques. En particulier, j’examine comment le cours de deuxieme annee sur les methodes de recherche juridique presente aux eleves la recherche juridique « traditionnelle » ainsi que l’analyse doctrinale dans le cadre d’etudes juridiques en adoptant certaines strategies pedagogiques. Le cours fournit ainsi une base importante permettant aux eleves de profiter des roles multiples de l’education juridique a l’exterieur des ecoles professionnelles de droit.
BigLaw Identity Capital: Pink and Blue, Black and White

A Caucasian male attorney joins a large law firm as a first year associate. In addition to his regular heavy workload, he is often invited to attend various firmwide events and functions, but his occasional absences are accepted and presumed to be the result of his work ethic and long billable hours. Over time, he receives a steady flow of assignments, a reasonable mix of paperwork and more challenging, quality assignments. He meets and develops an informal mentoring relationship with a few of the firm’s partners, including one or two of its powerful partners. At times he experiences pressure to meet the firm’s expectations, yet he is always treated with respect by partners and associates who assume that he is competent and loyal to the firm and its clients. Nothing in his formal and informal evaluations suggests any concerns, and he believes he is having a solid experience. During his fourth year at the firm, an entity client for which he has been working for a year approaches him about joining its inhouse legal department. He is flattered but decides to stay with the firm. Following his ninth year he is elected to the partnership. A Latina attorney joins a large law firm as a first year associate and is soon asked to join the firm’s diversity committee. In addition to her regular heavy workload, she is often invited to attend various firmwide events and functions, where she is photographed and later featured prominently on the firm’s website and print publications. She is also actively involved with the firm’s recruitment efforts, especially its efforts to recruit minority candidates. Over time, she receives a steady flow of assignments, a reasonable mix of paperwork and more challenging, quality assignments. She meets and develops an informal mentoring relationship with a few of the firm’s partners, including one or two of its minority partners. At times
Agreement and Uncertainty Among Climate Change Impact Models: A Synthesis of Sagebrush Steppe Vegetation Projections

Abstract Ecologists have built numerous models to project how climate change will impact rangeland vegetation, but these projections of future changes are difficult to validate, making their utility for land management planning unclear. In the absence of direct validation, researchers can ask whether projections from different models are consistent. High consistency across models, especially those based on different assumptions, would increase confidence in using projections for planning. Here, we analyzed 19 models of climate change impacts on sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata Nutt.), cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.), pinyon-juniper (Pinus L. spp. and Juniperus L. spp.), and forage production on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the US Intermountain West. These models consistently projected the potential for pinyon-juniper declines and forage production increases. In contrast, models of cheatgrass mainly projected no climate change impacts, while sagebrush models projected no change in most areas and declines in southern extremes. In most instances, vegetation projections from high- and low-emission scenarios differed only slightly. The projected vegetation impacts have important management implications for agencies such as the BLM. Pinyon-juniper declines would reduce the need to control pinyon-juniper encroachment, and increases in forage production could benefit livestock and wildlife populations in some regions. Sagebrush conservation and restoration projects may be challenged in areas projected to experience sagebrush declines. Similar projections from high- and low-emission scenario models may increase confidence to consider model projections in planning. However, projected vegetation impacts may also interact with increasing future wildfire risk in ways single-response models do not anticipate. In particular, forage production increases could increase management challenges related to fire.
Stochastic Devaluation Risk and the Empirical Fit of Target-Zone Models

In the model of this paper, an exchange rate fluctuates between given boundaries for random lengths of time and jumps discretely when devaluation occur. We provide explicit solutions for the stochastic processes followed by the exchange rate and by the expected rate of depreciation when the likelihood and the size of devaluations vary stochastically over time. The model produces realistic patterns of covariation between exchange rates and interest rate differentials, and provides interesting interpretations of available empirical evidence. We also specify how to infer devaluation risk from target zone data.
Regulation by generalization

Both criminal and regulatory laws have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses – the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has occurred. From Bentham to the present, courts and theorists have worried about this form of regulation, believing that certainly in the criminal law context, but even with respect to regulation, it is wrong to impose sanctions on a ‘‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire’’ theory of governmental intervention. Yet, although this kind punishment by proxy continues to be held in disrepute both in courts and in the published work, we argue that this distaste is unwarranted. Regulating – even through the criminal law – by regulating intrinsically innocent activities that probabilistically, but not inexorably, indicate not-so-innocent activities is no different from the vast number of other probabilistic elements that pervade the regulatory process. Once we recognize the frequency with which we accept probabilistic but not certain burdens of proof, probabilistic but not certain substantive rules, and probabilistic but not certain pieces of evidence, we can see that defining offenses and regulatory targets in terms of non-wrongful behavior that is evidence of wrongful behavior is neither surprising nor inadvisable.
SELECTION EFFECTS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM INDIVIDUAL ANNUITIES MARKET

This paper explores adverse selection in the voluntary and compulsory individual annuity markets in the United Kingdom. Two empirical regularities support standard models of adverse selection. First, annuitants are longer-lived than non-annuitants. These mortality differences are more pronounced in the voluntary than in the compulsory annuity market. We estimate that the amount of adverse selection in the compulsory market is about one half of that in the voluntary market. Second, the pricing of different types of annuity products within each annuity market is consistent with individuals selecting products based, in part, on private information about their mortality prospects. The aging of populations in many developed nations has generated substantial interest in the way households finance consumption in their retirement years. Annuities, insurance products that provide a payment stream for as long as the insured individual is alive, offer one way to spread an accumulated stock of resources over a retirement period of uncertain length. Theoretical research beginning with Yaari (1965) suggests substantial utility gains from annuitisation in the presence of stochastic length of life. Public policy discussions have also generated substantial current interest in the operation of annuity markets. The decline in long-term interest rates in the United Kingdom since the early 1990s has coincided with a decline in annuity payouts, relative to annuity premia. This has sparked a debate,
‘Law in Context’ Revisited

Although ‘Law in Context’ is a well-known motto for law-and-society scholarship, the idea could benefit from closer examination. This paper introduces a principle of `fidelity to context' and suggests that contexts may be transcended by invoking general purposes and principles. These issues have special relevance for contextual analysis of free speech, academic freedom, and other rights and responsibilities. I also consider the relevance of legal pluralism, and the contextual analysis of human rights.
Political-Economic Origins of the Recent Euro Crisis: A Tale of a Politically-Failing Single-Currency Area

The global financial crisis which erupted in the United States instantaneously swept across Europe. Like the United States, the European Monetary Union (EMU) was ripe for a crash. It had its own real estate bubble, specifically in Ireland and Spain, indulged in excessive deficit spending, financially deregulated, and rapidly expanded credit (partly through derivatives).1 Policy responses and recovery patterns for key EU members like Germany, France (within the Eurozone) and the United Kingdom (outside the Eurozone) were similar. However, after the bubble burst and the crisis began unfolding it became clear that the Eurozone plight differed from America's in one fundamental respect. There was no exact counterpart of Eurozone PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) in the United States. Some American states had over-borrowed, but the sovereign debt crisis didn't place individual states at deflationary risk, or threaten the viability of the federal union. Not so for some members within the Eurozone. During the US savings and loans crisis in the 1980s, the American south-western states received a transfer from the rest of the US states equal to almost 20 percent of their gross domestic products. But, such a transfer has not been politically feasible within members of the EMU. The American experience therefore demonstrates that Europe’s problem is not a pure economically failing single currency area; the failure is political in an institutional sense. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic can be uncooperative, but inter-state disputes are more easily finessed under the American federal system than the Eurozone politically weakly integrated system. The disparity is easily traced to the EU's and Eurozone's special form of governance called "supra-nationality" (a partially sovereign transnational organization) that has been largely ignored in economic treatises about the costs and benefits of customs unions, economic communities, and monetary unions.2 Until now, it has been tacitly assumed either that supranational governance was as good, or better, than national economic mechanisms; that any policy regime accessible to nation states could be replicated without dysfunction by supranational communities.
Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition

In ethnic and racial terms, America is growing rapidly more diverse. Yet attempts to extend racial threat hypotheses to today's immigrants have generated inconsistent results. This article develops the politicized places hypothesis, an alternative that focuses on how national and local conditions interact to construe immigrants as threatening. Hostile political reactions to neighboring immigrants are most likely when communities undergo sudden influxes of immigrants and when salient national rhetoric reinforces the threat. Data from several sources, including twelve geocoded surveys from 1992 to 2009, provide consistent support for this approach. Time-series cross-sectional and panel data allow the analysis to exploit exogenous shifts in salient national issues such as the September 11 attacks, reducing the problem of residential self-selection and other threats to validity. The article also tests the hypothesis using new data on local anti-immigrant policies. By highlighting the interaction of local and national conditions, the politicized places hypothesis can explain both individual attitudes and local political outcomes.
An analysis of default risk in the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program

Abstract While reverse mortgages are intended as a tool to enable financial security for older homeowners, in 2014, nearly 12 percent of reverse mortgage borrowers in the federally insured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) program were in default on their property taxes or homeowners insurance. Unlike the traditional mortgage market, there were no risk-based underwriting guidelines for HECMs through 2014. In response to the relatively high default rate, a variety of policy responses were implemented, including establishing underwriting guidelines. However, there is a lack of data and analysis to inform such criteria. Our analysis follows 30,000 seniors counseled for reverse mortgages between 2006 and 2011. The data includes comprehensive financial and credit report attributes, not typically available in analyses of reverse mortgage borrowers. Using a bivariate probit model that accounts for selection, we estimate the likelihood of tax and insurance default. Financial characteristics that increase default risk include the percentage of funds withdrawn in the first month of the loan, a lower credit score, higher property tax to income ratio, low or no unused revolving credit, and a history of being past due on mortgage payments or having a tax lien on the property. Our estimate of the elasticity of default with respect to credit scores is similar to that for closed-end home equity loans, but higher than that for HELOCs. We simulate the effects of alternative underwriting criteria and policy changes on the probability of take-up and default. Reductions in the default rate with a minimal effect on participation can be achieved by requiring that participants with low credit scores set aside some of their HECM funds for future property tax and insurance payments, a form of escrowing.
Is There a Trade-Off between Inflation and Output Stabilization?

We find that the answer is no in an estimated DSGE model of the US economy in which exogenous movements in workers’ market power are not a major driver of observed economic fluctuations. If they are, the tension between the conflicting stabilization objectives of monetary policy increases, but with negligible effects on the equilibrium behavior of the economy under optimal policy. (JEL E12, E23, E24, E31, E32, E52) Between 1954 and 2009, average GDP growth in the United States was 3.2 per cent per quarter at an annual rate, with a standard deviation of 3.8 percent. The origin of these fluctuations in economic activity is still a matter of debate. Even more controversial is the extent to which these fluctuations reflect movements in the economy’s efficient frontier, or inefficient departures from it. This distinction matters because stabilization policy can only play a useful role in the second case. We make two contributions to this debate. First, we show that changes in the economy’s degree of inefficiency and movements of its efficient frontier were both important factors behind the observed fluctuations in US output over the postwar period. Second, we compute the economy’s counterfactual evolution under optimal monetary policy and find that it involves a fairly weak trade-off between real and nominal stabilization. This result depends on the prior that exogenous movements in the competitiveness of the labor market are not a fundamental driver of macroeconomic fluctuations. If they are, the policy trade-off becomes steeper, but with only minor repercussions on the optimal equilibrium. Our results are based on an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, which is built around neoclassical growth foundations, but assumes
Critical Reception of Raz’s Theory of Authority

This is a canvass to the critical reaction to Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority, as well as actual or possible replies by Raz. Familiarity is assumed with the theory itself, covered in a previous article. The article focuses primarily on direct criticisms of Raz’s theory, rather than replies developed in the context of a theorist’s wider project.
Liquidity and Insurance for the Unemployed

We study the optimal design of unemployment insurance for workers sampling job opportunities over time. We focus on the optimal timing of benefits and the desirability of allowing workers to freely access a riskless asset. When workers have constant absolute risk aversion preferences it is optimal to use a very simple policy: a constant benefit during unemployment, a constant tax during employment that does not depend on the duration of the spell, and free access to savings using a riskless asset. Away from this benchmark, for constant relative risk aversion preferences, the welfare gains of more elaborate policies are minuscule. Our results highlight two largely distinct roles for policy toward the unemployed: (a) ensuring workers have sufficient liquidity to smooth their consumption; and (b) providing unemployment benefits that serve as insurance against the uncertain duration of unemployment spells.
Cap and Swaption Approximations in LIBOR Market Models with Jumps

This paper develops formulas for pricing caps and swaptions in Libor market models with jumps. The arbitrage-free dynamics of this class of models were characterized in Glasserman and Kou (2003) in a framework allowing for very general jump processes. For computational purposes, it is convenient to model jump times as Poisson processes; however, the Poisson property is not preserved under the changes of measure commonly used to derive prices in the Libor market model framework. In particular, jumps cannot be Poisson under both a forward measure and the spot measure, and this complicates pricing. To develop pricing formulas, we approximate the dynamics of a forward rate or swap rate using a scalar jump-diffusion process with time-varying parameters. We develop an exact formula for the price of an option on this jump-diffusion through explicit inversion of a Fourier transform. We then use this formula to price caps and swaptions by choosing the parameters of the scalar diffusion to approximate the arbitrage-free dynamics of the underlying forward or swap rate. We apply this method to two classes of models: one in which the jumps in all forward rates are Poisson under the spot measure, and one in which the jumps in each forward rate are Poisson under its associated forward measure. Numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy of the approximations.
Using methods from machine learning to evaluate behavioral models of choice under risk and ambiguity

Abstract How can behavioral science incorporate tools from machine learning (ML)? We propose that ML models can be used as upper bounds for the “explainable” variance in a given data set and thus serve as upper bounds for the potential power of a theory. We demonstrate this method in the domain of uncertainty. We ask over 600 individuals to make a total of 6000 choices with randomized parameters and compare standard economic models to ML models. In the domain of risk, a version of expected utility that allows for non-linear probability weighting (as in cumulative prospect theory) and individual-level parameters performs as well out-of-sample as ML techniques. By contrast, in the domain of ambiguity, two of the most widely studied models (a linear version of maximin preferences and second order expected utility) fail to compete with the ML methods. We open the “black boxes” of the ML methods and show that under risk we “rediscover” expected utility with probability weighting. However, in the case of ambiguity the form of ambiguity aversion implied by our ML models suggests that there is gain from theoretical work on a portable model of ambiguity aversion. Our results highlight ways in which behavioral scientists can incorporate ML techniques in their daily practice to gain genuinely new insights.
The death of the deal: Are withdrawn acquisition deals informative of CEO quality?

Withdrawn acquisition bids provide a unique mechanism to identify CEOs who restrain from extracting private benefits. I show that the market extracts valuable information about CEOs who exhibit restraint and withdraw from a deal when it becomes too expensive. Using a hand-collected sample of 530 withdrawn acquisition bids, I find that firms that cancel deals rather than raise their offer, experience 5% higher withdrawal returns than a control group of firms that withdraw for other reasons. Moreover, restraint information is more valuable to the capital market when CEO quality is uncertain and when monitoring is poor. The labor market also utilizes information on restraint. CEOs who exercise restraint are less likely to experience a turnover event, and more likely to advance to an executive role at a firm larger than the bidding firm, compared to a control group of CEOs who also initiate acquisition deals.
The Death Penalty and the Society We Want

Winston Churchill once observed: “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of any country. . . . [They] mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue within it.” It is worth a moment to examine how our society measures up by this standard and to look at the role that lawyers play in shaping the kind of society we have. At the local level, we can tell a lot about a community by how it treats a homeless person suffering from schizophrenia who is begging on the street. One possibility is to look upon that person with the thought that there but for grace go I, that this person is desperately in need of help, and that we—individually and as a community—must respond by giving a helping hand and making sure that the person receives food, shelter, clothing, and care for such a debilitating mental illness. Another possibility is to simply ignore the person, to step around him or her on the way to buying a five-dollar cup of coffee, asking one’s self only: “Why should I help this person? Why should I give any money? Why should I do anything at all?” Another approach—the predominant view in many communities today—is to ask, why isn’t that person in jail? Why hasn’t the person been arrested for violating one of the “quality of life crimes” which many communities have adopted to protect the quality of life of those better off at the expense of those who are worse off? They have accomplished this by criminalizing behavior such as jaywalking, loitering, panhandling, and other conduct that makes it possible for the police to arrest almost anyone to clear the street of people we do not want to see. This is the “broken windows” approach to policing that Rudolph Guiliani used in New York. It uses the criminal law to clear the streets of the homeless, the mentally ill, and other “undesirables.” So there are three possible approaches: compassion, indifference, and hostility. The one adopted by a community tells us a lot about it. Of course, there are different approaches to crime and criminals that are adopted at a much higher level of government. We might ask, does a society torture those it believes guilty of crimes? There is a fairly clear
Copyright Without Creators

Copyright is typically justified by the rationale that profits induce authors and other artists to invest in cultural production. This rationale is vulnerable to the objection that some artists have intrinsic production incentives and do not require significant capital. Even accepting this objection, copyright is justified by an alternative rationale: it principally supports the profitmotivated intermediaries that bear the high costs and risks involved in evaluating, distributing and marketing content in mass-cultural markets. This “authorless”� rationale is consistent with the intermediated structure of mass-cultural markets and accounts for long-standing features of copyright law that have conventionally been dismissed as unjustified transfers from consumers to media interests. The digital transformation of mass cultural markets, in which content is abundant but quality is variable, challenges and clarifies the intermediary-based rationale for copyright. Even in digitized content markets, robust copyright enables intermediaries to select from the full range of transactional structures for most efficiently bearing the costs and risks of screening, packaging, distributing and marketing content. Weak or zero copyright skews the market’s� selection� of� organizational� forms� by� compelling� the� use� of� intermediation� structures� that bundle unprotected content with excludable complementary goods. Preliminary evidence from the popular music market suggests that the effective decline in copyright protection has distorted the efficient selection of intermediation mechanisms.
Testing linear-invariant properties

Fix a prime $p$ and a positive integer $R$ . We study the property testing of functions $\mathbb{F}_{p}^{n}\rightarrow[R]$ . We say that a property is testable if there exists an oblivious tester for this property with one-sided error and constant query complexity. Furthermore, a property is proximity oblivious-testable (PO-testable) if the test is also independent of the proximity parameter $\epsilon$ . It is known that a number of natural properties such as linearity and being a low degree polynomial are PO-testable. These properties are examples of linear-invariant properties, meaning that they are preserved under linear automorphisms of the domain. Following work of Kaufman and Sudan, the study of linear-invariant properties has been an important problem in arithmetic property testing. A central conjecture in this field, proposed by Bhattacharyya, Grigorescu, and Shapira, is that a linear-invariant property is testable if and only if it is semi subspace-hereditary. We prove two results, the first resolves this conjecture and the second classifies PO-testable properties. 1)A linear-invariant property is testable if and only if it is semi subspace-hereditary. 2)A linear-invariant property is PO-testable if and only if it is locally characterized. Our innovations are two-fold. We give a more powerful version of the compactness argument first introduced by Alon and Shapira. This relies on a new strong arithmetic regularity lemma in which one mixes different levels of Gowers uniformity. This allows us to extend the work of Bhattacharyya, Fischer, Hatami, Hatami, and Lovett by removing the bounded complexity restriction in their work. Our second innovation is a novel recoloring technique called patching. This Ramsey-theoretic technique is critical for working in the linear-invariant setting and allows us to remove the translation-invariant restriction present in previous work.
Roadblock to Innovation: The Role of Patent Litigation in Corporate R&D

I examine how patent enforcement affects corporate research and development (R&D), exploiting the legal changes induced by the Supreme Court decision eBay v. MercExchange. This ruling increased cou...
A General Sensitivity Analysis Approach for Demand Response Optimizations

In this work, we build upon existing literature on the demand response (DR) market, which consists of price-taking prosumers each with various appliances, an electric utility company and a social welfare optimizing distribution system operator, to design a general sensitivity analysis approach (GSAA) that can quantitatively estimate the potential of each consumer's contribution to the social welfare when given more resource capacity, such as allowing net-selling behavior. GSAA is based on existence of an efficient competitive equilibrium, which we establish in the paper. When prosumers’ utility functions are quadratic, GSAA can give closed forms characterization on social welfare improvement based on duality analysis. Furthermore, we extend GSAA to a general convex settings, i.e., utility functions with strong convexity and Lipschitz continuous gradient. Even without knowing the specific forms the utility functions, we can derive upper and lower bounds of the social welfare improvement potential of each prosumer, when extra resource is introduced. For both settings, several applications and numerical examples are provided: including extending AC comfort zone, ability of EV to discharge and net-selling behavior. The estimation results show that GSAA can be used to decide how to allocate potentially limited DR market resources in a more impactful way.
Smart-PGSim: Using Neural Network to Accelerate AC-OPF Power Grid Simulation

In this work we address the problem of accelerating complex power-grid simulation through machine learning (ML). Specifically, we develop a framework, Smart-PGSim, which generates multitask-learning (MTL) neural network (NN) models to predict the initial values of variables critical to the problem convergence. MTL models allow information sharing when predicting multiple dependent variables while including customized layers to predict individual variables. We show that, to achieve the required accuracy, it is paramount to embed domain-specific constraints derived from the specific power-grid components in the MTL model. Smart-PGSim then employs the predicted initial values as a high-quality initial condition for the power-grid numerical solver (warm start), resulting in both higher performance compared to state-of-the-art solutions while maintaining the required accuracy. Smart-PGSim brings $2. 60 \times$ speedup on average (up to $3. 28 \times$) computed over 10,000 problems, without losing solution optimality.
Climate Change and the Energy Challenge: A Pragmatic Approach for India

India has been arguing that it (and the rest of the developing world) should incur no expense in controlling emissions that cause climate change. In the face of heightened concerns about rapid climate change, that argument is increasingly losing force - both in the fundamental arithmetic of climate change, and in the political reality that important western partners will increasingly demand more of India and other developing countries. The Indian government has outlined a broad
Virtual Resolutions of Monomial Ideals on Toric Varieties

We use cellular resolutions of monomial ideals to prove an analog of Hilbert's syzygy theorem for virtual resolutions of monomial ideals on smooth toric varieties.
Nodal line estimates for the second Dirichlet eigenfunction

We study the nodal curves of low energy Dirichlet eigenfunctions in generalized curvilinear quadrilaterals. The techniques can be seen as a generalization of the tools developed by Grieser-Jerison in a series of works on convex planar domains and rectangles with one curved edge and a large aspect ratio. Here, we study the structure of the nodal curve in greater detail, in that we find precise bounds on its curvature, with uniform estimates up to the two points where it meets the domain at right angles, and show that many of our results hold for relatively small aspect ratios of the side lengths. We also discuss applications of our results to Courant-sharp eigenfunctions and spectral partitioning.
Bounds for the Tracking Error of First-Order Online Optimization Methods

This paper investigates online algorithms for smooth time-varying optimization problems, focusing first on methods with constant step-size, momentum, and extrapolation-length. Assuming strong convexity, precise results for the tracking iterate error (the limit supremum of the norm of the difference between the optimal solution and the iterates) for online gradient descent are derived. The paper then considers a general first-order framework, where a universal lower bound on the tracking iterate error is established. Furthermore, a method using “long-steps” is proposed and shown to achieve the lower bound up to a fixed constant. This method is then compared with online gradient descent for specific examples. Finally, the paper analyzes the effect of regularization when the cost is not strongly convex. With regularization, it is possible to achieve a non-regret bound. The paper ends by testing the accelerated and regularized methods on synthetic time-varying least-squares and logistic regression problems, respectively.
Particles to partial differential equations parsimoniously.

Equations governing physico-chemical processes are usually known at microscopic spatial scales, yet one suspects that there exist equations, e.g., in the form of partial differential equations (PDEs), that can explain the system evolution at much coarser, meso-, or macroscopic length scales. Discovering those coarse-grained effective PDEs can lead to considerable savings in computation-intensive tasks like prediction or control. We propose a framework combining artificial neural networks with multiscale computation, in the form of equation-free numerics, for the efficient discovery of such macro-scale PDEs directly from microscopic simulations. Gathering sufficient microscopic data for training neural networks can be computationally prohibitive; equation-free numerics enable a more parsimonious collection of training data by only operating in a sparse subset of the space–time domain. We also propose using a data-driven approach, based on manifold learning (including one using the notion of unnormalized optimal transport of distributions and one based on moment-based description of the distributions), to identify macro-scale dependent variable(s) suitable for the data-driven discovery of said PDEs. This approach can corroborate physically motivated candidate variables or introduce new data-driven variables, in terms of which the coarse-grained effective PDE can be formulated. We illustrate our approach by extracting coarse-grained evolution equations from particle-based simulations with a priori unknown macro-scale variable(s) while significantly reducing the requisite data collection computational effort.
Scattering on the Dirac magnetic monopole

We construct wave operators and a scattering operator for the scattering of a charged particle on the Dirac magnetic monopole. The analysis features a two-Hilbert-space approach in which the identification operator matches states of the same angular momentum.
Regularity of distributional solutions to stochastic acoustic and elastic scattering problems

Abstract This paper is concerned with the well-posedness and regularity of the distributional solutions for the stochastic acoustic and elastic scattering problems. We show that the regularity of the solutions depends on the regularity of both the random medium and the random source.