cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Reassessing Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” (1959):

In 1959, Hannah Arendt published an essay in Dissent criticizing the school integration movement. Ever since, the essay has been understood as an anomaly in her work and an affront to the school in...
Prohibitions, price caps, and disclosures: A look at state policies and alternative financial product use

Abstract This study uses nationally representative data from the 2009 National Financial Capability State-by-State Survey to examine the relationship between state-level alternative financial service (AFS) policies (prohibitions, price caps, disclosures) and consumer use of five AFS products: payday loans, auto title loans, pawn broker loans, refund anticipation loans, and rent-to-own transactions. Looking across products rather than at one product in isolation allows a focus on patterns and relationships across products. The results suggest that more stringent price caps and prohibitions are associated with lower product use and do not support the hypothesis that prohibitions and price caps on one AFS product lead consumers to use other AFS products.
PORTFOLIO FORMATION, MEASUREMENT ERRORS, AND BETA SHIFTS: A RANDOM SAMPLING APPROACH

This article demonstrates that the portfolio approach could suffer a serious problem when the sorting variables contain not only true values but also measurement errors. The grouped measurement errors will be embedded into the data used to test financial models and further bias the testing results. To correct for this measurement-error problem, I develop a random sampling approach to form portfolios. Results from this new methodology are unbiased and robust. By applying this methodology to investigate beta shifts, I show that the previous results about beta shifts are driven by measurement errors. The actual beta shift pattern is more complicated than that predicted by previous studies. The risk shift hypothesis is unlikely to explain the mean-reversion puzzle for stock returns. JEL classification: Gil, C43.
Formation of Segregated and Integrated Groups

A model of group formation is presented such that the number of groups is fixed, and a person can only join a group if the group’s members approve the person’s joining. Agents have either local status preferences (each agent wants to be the highest status agent in his group) or global status preferences (each agent wants to join the highest status group that she can join). For both preference types, conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of a segregated stable partition such that similar people are grouped together, and conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of an integrated stable partition such that dissimilar people are grouped together. Additionally, in a dynamic framework we show that if a new empty group is added to a segregated stable partition, then integration may occur.
The Limits of Social Norms

Legal scholars have expressed a growing interest in the power of social norms. Legal scholars now frequently argue that people obey the law even in the absence of legal sanctions and order their lives effectively without the assistance of courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies. This work promises to provide social reformers with inexpensive and effective ways of controlling anti-social behavior. Social psychologists, however, have conducted decades of research on social norms indicating that it is difficult to manipulate behavior by manipulating social norms in a reliable manner. Although social norms are important determinants of behavior, their influence can also be quite ephemeral. This Article presents social psychological research demonstrating that social norms are both more powerful and less powerful than legal scholars have heretofore recognized.
Do tariffs matter for the extensive margin of international trade? An empirical analysis

Abstract With disaggregate tariff data we study the impact of changing tariffs on the range of goods countries export to the United States. Our probits with country and good effects show tariffs tend to have a statistically significant but small impact: at best 5% of the increasing extensive margin for 1989–1999 and 12% for 1996–2006 is explained by tariff reductions. This suggests the extensive margin has not amplified the impact of tariffs on trade flows to such an extent that the relatively moderate tariff reductions since WW II can explain the strong growth of world trade.
Does it matter how people speak

Language serves two key functions. It enables communication between agents, which allows for the establishment and operation of formal and informal institutions. It also serves a less obvious function, a reassuring quality more closely related to issues linked with trust, social capital, and cultural identification. While research on the role of language as a learning process is widespread, there is no evidence on the role of language as a signal of cultural affinity. I pursue this latter avenue of research and show that subtle language affinity is positively linked with change in earnings when using English-speaking data for cities in the Golden Horseshoe area in Southern Ontario during the period 1991 to 2001. The results are robust to changes in specification, a broad number of empirical tests, and a diverse set of outcome variables.
Infinite divisibility, completeness and regression properties of the univariate generalized waring distribution

This paper is concerned with properties of the univariate generalized Waring distribution such as infinite divisibility, discrete self-decomposability, completeness and regression.
Christianity and the (Modest) Rule of Law

Conservative Christians are often accused, justifiably, of trying to impose their moral views on the rest of the population: of trying to equate God's law with man's law. In this essay, we try to answer the question whether that equation is consistent with Christianity.It isn't. Christian doctrines of creation and the fall imply the basic protections associated with the rule of law. But the moral law as defined in the Sermon on the Mount is flatly inconsistent with those protections. The most plausible inference to draw from those two conclusions is that the moral law - God's law - is meant to play a different role than the law of code books and case reports. Good morals inspire and teach; good law governs. When the roles are confused, law ceases to rule and discretion rules in its place. That is a lesson that many of our fellow religious believers would do well to learn: Christians on the right and on the left are too quick to seek to use law to advance their particular moral visions, without taking proper account of the limits of law's capacity to shape the culture it governs. But the lesson is not only for religious believers. America's legal system purports to honor the rule of law, but in practice it is honored mostly in the breach. One reason why is the gap between law's capacity and the ambitions lawmakers and legal theorists have for it. Properly defining the bounds of law's empire is the key to ensuring that law, not discretion, rules.
What Do We Know About Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States

In Piketty’s (2014) prominent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he argues that the concentration of wealth may become increasingly extreme in the future. As Piketty reminds us, the group of rentiers—people living off accumulated capital—has been historically large and politically and socially influential. Because so much of large fortunes end up being inherited, the current concentration of wealth is bound to predict at least weakly, and perhaps strongly, how important rentiers will be. Regardless of whether one buys into depictions such as “the rentier, enemy of democracy” (p. 422), the extent to which the well-off are going to rely on work versus rely on the returns to their wealth in the future is clearly important for assessing the extent to which a society will view itself as in some way a meritocracy. Given that the US economy has experienced rising inequality in its income and earning distributions (for example, Piketty and Saez 2003; or see the symposium on “The Top 1 Percent” in the Summer 2013 issue of this journal), one would expect that the distribution of wealth would follow a similar path. However, available evidence on this topic is much more scant and conflicting than that on income and earnings. In fact, when Piketty (2014) reports direct estimates of wealth concentration for France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States in chapter 10 of his book, he finds as yet little evidence of dramatic increase in wealth concentration in any of these countries.
Money demand and inflation in dollarized economies: The case of Russia

Abstract Money demand in dollarized economies often appears to be highly unstable, making it difficult to forecast and control inflation. In this paper, we show that a stable money demand function can be found for Russia by using effective broad money, which includes an estimate of foreign cash holdings. Moreover, we show that an excess supply of effective broad money is inflationary, while other excess money measures are not. Finally, we demonstrate that effective broad money growth has the strongest and most persistent effect on short-run inflation. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (3) (2005) 462–483.
The Middle East and North Africa's Resilient Monarchs

This article helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA during the Arab Spring. The region’s monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the “republics” have not. A theory about how a monarchy’s political culture solves a ruler’s credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950–2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than nonmonarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.
Public Opinion and the Demise of Affirmative Action

Skewed perceptions about the black condition and a quiet avoidance of racial realities now dominate discussions about race. It is common to hear that discrimination is not a norm but an aberration, and that white disadvantage mirrors that of blacks. Part I of this article evaluates the link between increasingly widespread images of black success and declining realities of whiteness as privilege25 and its impact on the future of affirmative action. Part II shows that tying white disadvantage to black opportunity and achievement is not new and has always been strong currency in Supreme Court civil rights jurisprudence. Part II also shows that, while available scholarship has focused on the interpretive aspects of the Court's affirmative action jurisprudence, it has paid little or no attention to the role of public perception in redirecting the Court's attention to the concerns of whites. Part III of this article argues that public mood and opinion are more powerful than the constitutional and statutory provisions implicated in the affirmative action debate because public opinion is a key force driving the interpretation given to those provisions. Part IV evaluates the effect of public opposition to racial competition and the theory of colorblindness on affirmative action programs in the areas of education, voting, and employment. This article contends that we must recognize racial discrimination and continue to work at eradicating such practices. Identifying how discrimination against blacks continues will serve as a counterweight to perceptions of black advantage and will minimize the public outcry against affirmative action.
Value‐Glamour and Accruals Mispricing: One Anomaly or Two?

We investigate whether the accruals anomaly is a manifestation of the glamour stock phenomenon documented in the finance literature. Value (glamour) stocks, characterized by low (high) past sales growth, high (low) book‐to‐market (B/M), high (low) earnings‐to‐price (E/P), and high (low) cash flow‐to‐price (C/P), are known to earn positive (negative) future abnormal returns. Note that “C” or cash flow is operationalized in the finance literature as earnings adjusted for depreciation. Sloan (1996) shows that firms with low (high) total accruals earn positive (negative) future abnormal returns. We find that a new variable, operating cash flows measured as earnings adjusted for depreciation and working capital accruals, scaled by price (CFO/P) captures mispricing attributed to the four traditional value‐glamour proxies and accruals. Interpretation of this finding depends on the reader's priors. If the reader believes that value‐glamour phenomenon can be operationalized only as C/P, and not CFO/P, then one wou...
”Benefit of Clergy” in Maryland and Virginia

Many historians know of the famous trial of British soldiers involved in the "Boston Massacre" of March 5, 1770, after which two of the soldiers received "benefit of clergy."' Before the justices of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, a jury of New Englanders, none of them Bostonians, found all of the defendants innocent of murder. However, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against two defendants, whereupon the convicted soldiers immediately asked the justices for benefit of clergy. Benefit of clergy was granted, and the court ordered the men "burnt in the hand," and released.
Ten Things to do About Patent Holdup of Standards (and One Not To)

A central fact about the information technology sector is the multiplicity of patents that innovators must deal with. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of patents cover semiconductor, software, telecommunications, and Internet inventions. Because of the nature of information technology, innovation often requires the combination of a number of different patents. Currently, various features of the patent system facilitate holdup, particularly in the standard-setting context. These features include insufacient discounting in damages for patent infringement and the resultant inoated demands for royalties, the low standard of proof for willful infringement, which allows patentees to recover treble damages, and the threat of injunctive relief. Frequently, innovators make irreversible investments in their development of new technology, only to have those investments used against them as a bargaining chip by existing patent holders. This Article suggests ave steps that standardsetting organizations may take to reduce the problem of patent holdup and ave ways the law should change to deal with the problem.
DOWNSIDE RISK AND THE MOMENTUM EFFECT

Stocks with greater downside risk, which is measured by higher correlations conditional on downside moves of the market, have higher returns. After controlling for the market beta, the size effect and the book-to-market effect, the average rate of return on stocks with the greatest downside risk exceeds the average rate of return on stocks with the least downside risk by 6.55% per annum. Downside risk is important for explaining the cross-section of expected returns. In particular of the profitability of investing in momentum strategies can be explained as compensation for bearing high exposure to downside risk.
Systematically Biased Beliefs about Economics: Robust Evidence of Judgemental Anomalies from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy

Differences between the general public's positive economic views and economists' resemble other judgemental anomalies: Laypeople and experts systematically disagree. I analyse this puzzle using data from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. The paper first tests and decisively rejects the hypothesis that the differences solely reflect economists' self-serving bias. Then it examines whether economists' political ideology and party loyalties explain the disagreement; if anything, this slightly increases their magnitude. The effect of economic training clearly falls but remains large after adding education to the set of control variables. Apparent biases' robustness suggests that the anomaly is real.
Regulating Your Second Life: Defamation in Virtual Worlds

Although the issue of virtual harm has never been raised in real-world courts, virtual worlds like Second Life have become increasingly significant in terms of both time and money for their users. As such, it is important to develop theories of how the law may apply to and resolve disputes that originate in these worlds. This Note will therefore argue that because users have imported real-world concepts, specifically currency and economy, into the metaverse, it would behoove brick and mortar societies to provide for redress if a user suffers pecuniary loss in these worlds. This Note will also explore certain ambiguities inherent and unique to the virtual environment when traditional elements of defamation law are applied to it. Moreover, this Note will argue that real-world courts should be the proper forum in which to litigate defamation actions, where victims suffer pecuniary loss due to the fall of their reputations.
Information Choice, Uncertainty, and Expected Returns

We investigate how information choices impact equity returns and risk. Building on an existing theoretical model of information and investment choice, we estimate a learning index that reflects the expected benefits of learning about an asset. High learning index stocks have lower future returns and risk compared to low learning index stocks. Analysis of a conditional asset pricing model, long run patterns in returns and volatilities, other measures of information flow, and the information environment surrounding earnings announcements reinforce our interpretation of the learning index. Our findings support the model's predictions and illustrate a novel empirical measure of investor learning.
On the Scope and Drivers of the Asset Growth Effect

Recent papers have debated whether the negative correlation between measures of firm asset growth and subsequent returns is of little importance since it applies only to small firms, is justified as compensation for risk, or is evidence of mispricing. We show that the asset growth effect is pervasive, and evidence to the contrary arises due to specification choices; that one measure of asset growth, the change in total assets, largely subsumes the explanatory power of other measures; that the ability of asset growth to explain either the cross section of returns or the time series of factor loadings is linked to firm idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL); that the return effect is concentrated around earnings announcements; and that analyst forecasts are systematically higher than realized earnings for faster growing firms. In general, there appears to be no asset growth effect in firms with low IVOL. Our findings are consistent with a mispricing-based explanation for the asset growth effect in which arbitrage costs allow the effect to persist.
Dangerous perspectives. The perils of individualizing public health problems.

In May 2007 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it had issued its first federal quarantine order on an individual in over 40 years. 1 The subject of the order, Atlan...
The robustness of the Sarbanes Oxley effect on the U.S. capital market

We examine the incidence of new listings and delistings on U.S. stock exchanges and firms’ propensity to delist, as a function of general market conditions, firm fundamentals, and the costs of compliance with the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX). We find that both general market conditions and firm fundamentals explain the delisting incidence and firms’ delisting decisions; while SOX variables are positively associated with firms’ delisting likelihood only when general market conditions are not included in the analyses. Further analyses on the population partitioned into size quintiles suggest that the passage of SOX was not associated with an increase in the likelihood of delisting for any size quintile of firms and that the implementation of SOX section 404 is positively associated with the delisting likelihood for midsized and larger firms. Our empirical evidence is useful to regulators as they consider changes in the imposition and implementation of SOX section 404.
Lawyers as Quasi-Public Actors

American lawyers are often conceived of as agents of the client (mere hired guns or mouthpieces for their client) who can select specific categories of clients at their discretion. However, the law governing lawyers as a whole is not purely private in nature as it does place some public duties on lawyers. An example of this is the rule in the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct that imposes a duty on lawyers to provide pro bono legal services to those who need it. Although this duty is not enforceable through the disciplinary process, this responsibility will nevertheless continue to fall on individual lawyers due to the political realities in the United States. The author provides a justification for this unenforceable requirement by conceptualizing lawyers as quasi-public officials, thereby imbuing the lawyer’s role with responsibilities to both the client and to the legal system. Rather than being soley private actors, lawyers have a duty to act in the interests of justice, thereby ensuring “access to justice.”
Tax and Expenditure Limitations and the Fiscal Response of Local Government: Asymmetric Intra‐Local Fiscal Effects

This article empirically investigates the effects of introducing statewide measures to limit the ability of local jurisdictions to raise revenue or make expenditures. It does so in intervals of five years over a 25-year period, using fiscal observations for 31,804 units of local government in 787 metropolitan counties across the contiguous United States. Specifically explored is the effect of tax and expenditure limitations on the variation in revenues and expenditures between general purpose governments and school districts within county areas. Rather than imposing a uniform constraint across jurisdictions, tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) are associated with increased variation across both general purpose and school district revenues and expenditures and, by implication, increased service differentials. Effects are found to be asymmetric, with increased variation greatest within counties comprising the urban core and those with relatively more disadvantaged populations. The implications are that TELs are most constraining on the ability of governments serving economically less prosperous and at risk populations to meet public service needs. Such differential effects are of more than questionable merit and are the result of the application of blunt instruments to what is often an undemonstrated need. The outcome impairs both the efficiency and responsiveness of the local public sector.
Who Owns Gene Editing? Patents in the Time of CRISPR

New gene-editing technologies, like CRISPR, promise revolutionary advances in biology and medicine. However, several patent disputes in the USA and UK may have complicated who can use CRISPR. What does this mean for the future of gene editing?
A comment on ‘the extraordinary claim of praxeology’ by Professor Gutiérrez

Ludvig von Mises and the Austrian School of Praxeological Economics do make a claim that can only be considered extraordinary, considering the type of methodology that now pervades our social science Establishment. And the claim is that there is economic knowledge that can be both known with apodictic certainty, and be of great usefulness in understanding the world in which we live. Prof. Gutierrez, defending the accepted view that knowledge can either be known with apodictic certainty, or have usefulness for understanding the real world, but not both, attacks praxeological allegations to the contrary, and is in turn, criticized by the author.
Encouraging Professional Skepticism in the Industry Specialization Era

This paper provides theory and experimental evidence that, under common audit conditions, industry specialization inhibits some aspects of auditors’ professional skepticism. As auditors amass industry experience, they develop extensive knowledge of non-misstatement explanations for unusual financial statement fluctuations. This knowledge coupled with confidence in their ability to analyze audit evidence inhibits their inclination to be skeptical when there are no overt indicators of elevated misstatement risk. Although these conditions are, by definition, the conditions where misstatements are least likely, they are also the same conditions where the PCAOB has alleged pervasive insufficient professional skepticism and where well-concealed fraud is possible. These results pose an ethical dilemma for the PCAOB in terms of weighing its charge to protect the public interest against the fairness of its inspections to audit firms. Encouragingly, I also predict and find that audit firm efforts to promote professional skepticism are more effective for specialists as non-specialists are skeptical regardless of these efforts.
"Mortal [K]ombat in cleats": An Examination of the Effectiveness of the National Football League's Disability Plan and Its Impact on Retired Players

... A collective bargaining agreement was first reached in 1962, establishing the "Bert Bell NFL Player Retirement Plan," that "provided enhanced retirement, disability and related benefits to eligible former professional football players." ... Moreover, a 1998 amendment to the Plan was made to specifically address the awarding of disability benefits for head injuries, among other illnesses. ... Civil Action under ERISA Should a former player remain dissatisfied with the outcome of his application, under ERISA, " a civil action may be brought ... by a participant or beneficiary ... to recover benefits due to him under the terms of his plan, to enforce his rights under the terms of the plan, or to clarify his rights to future benefits under the terms of the plan." ... It was not until the spring of 1999 that Webster completed an application for disability benefits under the Plans, applying for Active Football benefits and, in the alternative, Football Degenerative benefits. ... Brent Boyd said "he was even told early in the process by an NFLPA benefits employee that he shouldn't bother filing a claim because "the owners will never open this can of worms by approving a disability claim for a head injury." ... An additional improvement includes a recent decision by the NFL/NFLPA to automatically grant disability claims made by those eligible retirees already receiving social security benefits.
U.S. domestic regulation of national airspace: An evolution and suggested way ahead

•The various state and federal attempts at legislating UAS operations use over the last two years have been inconsistent, albeit with limited threads of similarity. The focus remains on regulating government actors. Legislators continue to take a smorgasbord-style approach to applying the Fourth Amendment. Helpful clauses that would protect individual privacy in a meaningful way still seem to elude most proposals. Procedural requirements and criminalization of government non-compliant UAS activity are proliferating at a breakneck pace.
Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II

Economic growth within countries varies sharply across decades. This paper examines one explanation for these sustained shifts in growth— changes in the national leader. We use deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation in leadership, and ask whether these plausibly exogenous leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates. We find robust evidence that leaders matter for growth. The results suggest that the effects of individual leaders are strongest in autocratic settings where there are fewer constraints on a leader’s power. Leaders also appear to affect policy outcomes, particularly monetary policy. The results suggest that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations.
Information Environment and the Investment Decisions of Multinational Corporations

ABSTRACT: This paper examines how the external information environment in which foreign subsidiaries operate affects the investment decisions of multinational corporations (MNCs). We hypothesize and find that the investment decisions of foreign subsidiaries in country-industries with more transparent information environments are more responsive to local growth opportunities than are those of foreign subsidiaries in country-industries with less transparent information environments. Further, this effect is larger when (1) there are greater cross-border frictions between the parent and subsidiary, and (2) the parents are relatively more involved in their subsidiaries' investment decision-making process. Our results suggest that the external information environment helps mitigate the agency problems that arise when firms expand their operations across borders. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that the external information environment helps MNCs mitigate information frictions within the firm...
“Spooky Action at a Distance”: Intangible Injury in Fact in the Information Age

Two decades after Justice William O. Douglas coined “injury in fact” as the token of admission to federal court under Article III, Justice Antonin Scalia sealed it into the constitutional canon in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife. In the two decades since Lujan, Justice Scalia has thrown increasingly pointed barbs at the permissive standing doctrine of the Warren Court, maintaining it is founded on impermissible recognition of “Psychic Injury.” Justice Scalia and his acolytes take the position that Article III requires a toughminded, common sense, and practical approach. Injuries in fact must be “tangible,” “direct,” “concrete,” “de facto” realities in time and space, free from spooky entities like “Psychic Injury.” Albert Einstein famously maintained that quantum mechanics could not be a proper and complete theory on the ground that “physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance.” The problem that ultimately overtook Einstein’s argument was that experimental results vindicating quantum mechanics stubbornly continued to appear in the journals. The burden of this Article is to demonstrate that spooky “injuries in fact” involving information have stubbornly continued to appear in United States Reports. It shows that the Court has regularly adjudicated the controversies of the information age: disputes regarding illicit acquisition of information, denial of access to information, and improper exposure to information and intellectual property. And it argues that the Court will continue to do so. These adjudications fatally undermine an account of Article III that insists on “direct,” “tangible,” and “palpable” injuries to physical or economic interests as the price of admission to the federal courthouse, and profoundly alter notions of “particularized” and “imminent” injury. Information is by nature intangible, and information plays an increasingly dominant role in our social, economic, political, and cultural life. Information is largely non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Violations of duties regarding information thus regularly result in injuries that are “general” rather than “particularized.” And, with the advent of the Internet, informational harm is pandemically “imminent”: information can be spookily and instantaneously “present” at opposite ends of the country, or of the globe.
Instrumental variables estimates of the effect of subsidized training on the quantiles of trainee earnings

This paper reports estimates of the effects of JTPA training programs on the distribution of earnings. The estimation uses a new instrumental variable (IV) method that measures program impacts on quantiles. The quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimator reduces to quantile regression when selection for treatment is exogenously determined. QTE can be computed as the solution to a convex linear programming problem, although this requires first-step estimation of a nuisance function. We develop distribution theory for the case where the first step is estimated nonparametrically. For women, the empirical results show that the JTPA program had the largest proportional impact at low quantiles. Perhaps surprisingly, however, JTPA training raised the quantiles of earnings for men only in the upper half of the trainee earnings distribution.
Using Simulations in Linked Courses to Foster Student Understanding of Complex Political Institutions.

Political institutions provide basic building blocks for understanding and comparing political systems. Yet, students often struggle to understand the implications of institutional choice, such as electoral system rules, especially when the formulas and calculations used to determine seat allocation can be multilevel and complex. This study brings together an upper level Political Parties and Interest Groups course with an introductory Comparative Politics course through two-types of interaction: discussion board and a face-to-face election simulation. We administer a pretest and posttest to gauge student learning as a result of the simulation. We hypothesize that, by bringing together two courses with different levels (upper division and lower division) and emphases in bases of knowledge, we are able to enhance the experience of the election simulation to stimulate higher degrees of learning across both courses.
Fairness and Antitrust Reconsidered: An Evolutionary Perspective

This Article reconsiders the antitrust fairness-versus-welfare debate from an evolutionary perspective. It discusses the various arguments against applying fairness norms in antitrust cases and then sets forth the arguments for reincorporating fairness norms into antitrust analyses. Building upon the evolutionary analyses in previous papers, and the growing "enthusiasm or approaches that try to link our morality to our evolutionary biology," This article recommends that courts and antitrust regulators apply an evolutionary analysis instead of the static economic consumer and total welfare norms in vogue today. The new focus would be on fairness norms, intent, and competitive harm.
Collaborative Work Dynamics in Projects with Co-Production

Many knowledge-intensive projects such as new product and software design, research, and high technology development have flexible scope and involve co-production between a client and a vendor. In such projects, it is often challenging to estimate how much progress can be achieved within a certain time window or how much time may be needed to achieve a certain degree of progress, especially because the client and vendor often adjust their efforts as a function of the project's progress, the time until the deadline, and the incentives in place. Effective contracts should therefore be flexible in scope and foster collaboration. In this study, we characterize the collaborative work dynamics of a client and a vendor who are engaged in a multi-state, multi-period stochastic project with a finite deadline. We show that when the client can verify the vendor's effort, it is optimal that they both exert high effort in one of two situations: when either not enough progress has been made and the deadline is close (deadline effect), or conversely, when so much progress has been made that the project state is close to a completion state set by the client (milestone effect). Hence, in this case, progress will typically be faster when the project is about to be stopped, due to either reaching the deadline or reaching the client's desired completion state. However, when the client cannot verify the vendor's effort, the vendor is prone to free-riding. Considering a time-based contract that pays the vendor a per-period fee and a fixed completion bonus, we show that the equilibrium completion state is decreasing in the per-period fee and increasing in the bonus, justifying the use of both incentive mechanisms in practice. Moreover, we show that, under such contracts, some form of milestone effect arises in equilibrium, but the deadline effect does not. Hence, in those cases, early progress will typically lead to early project conclusion at a high state; whereas, slow progress will typically make the project drag until the deadline while still at a low state.
On the hidden links between financial and trade opening

Abstract Developing countries characterized by high costs of tax collection and enforcement opt to use financial repression as an implicit tax on savings, providing the impetus for capital flight. A mechanism facilitating illicit capital movements is trade misinvoicing, where the effectiveness of capital controls would increase with the resources spent on monitoring and enforcement per one dollar of international trade. Under these circumstances, greater trade openness increases the effective cost of enforcing financial repression, thereby reducing the usefulness of financial repression as an implicit tax. This in turn implies that financial reforms tend to be the by-product of greater trade integration.
Institutional design and the closure of public facilities in transition economies

As part of the reforms of their systems for financing and delivering health care, many transition economies, particularly in central and eastern Europe, have adopted national insurance funds that are institutionally separate from ministries of health. Most of these countries have also grappled with the problem of restructuring the delivery system, especially the need to reduce hospital capacity. Although improving the performance of medical care providers through a shift from passive budgeting to explicitly incentive mechanisms is important, why this change in financial relations between the government and providers could not be implemented simply by reforming the role of health ministries is not obvious. This paper presents an explicit rationale for the separation of powers between the regulator (the ministry of health) and the financing body (the insurance fund), based on the inability of a single agency to commit to closing hospitals. JEL classification: L51, P20, P35, I18.
Governance and Bank Valuation

Which public policies and ownership structures enhance the governance of banks? The authors construct a new database on the ownership of banks internationally and then assess the ramifications of ownership, shareholder protection laws, and supervisory and regulatory policies on bank valuations. Except in a few countries with very strong shareholder protection laws, banks are not widely held, but rather families or the state tend to control banks. The authors find that: (i) Larger cash flow rights by the controlling owner boosts valuations; (ii) Stronger shareholder protection laws increase valuations; and (iii) Greater cash flow rights mitigate the adverse effects of weak shareholder protection laws on bank valuations. These results are consistent with the views that expropriation of minority shareholders is important internationally, that laws can restrain this expropriation, and concentrated cash flow rights represent an important mechanism for governing banks. Finally, the evidence does not support the view that empowering official supervisory and regulatory agencies will increase the market valuation of banks.
Fiscal Foresight and Information Flows

News�or foresight�about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non-fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example of foresight, simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non-fundamental equilibria. Econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes; biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes. Both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized information flows. Different methods for extracting or hypothesizing the information flows are discussed and shown to be alternative techniques for resolving a non-uniqueness problem endemic to moving average representations.
Biotechnology and International Law

Emerging applications in the field of biotechnology hold great promise for promoting the health and well-being of the global community, especially in developing states. Yet significant concerns have emerged about biotechnology in the transnational sphere, concerns that no doubt will increase in decades to come. The purpose of the article is to assess the strengths and limits of existing international norms and structures designed to address these concerns, and to suggest a means for augmenting current structures to make them more effective. International law develops and regulates transnational behavior in a manner that goes well beyond the development treaty regimes. International law is driven in large part by the self-interest of states, but they also arise from the social interaction of states and non-state actors, and they ultimately must become grounded in national laws and society in order to become effective. This article accordingly emphasizes the need for coordination at different levels of state and non-state behavior as the law develops over time as well as the need for coordination across different treaty regimes. While states should continue to grapple with concerns in the area of biotechnology through incremental tinkering of existing treaty regimes - seen most recently in the adoption of a Biosafety Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity - the article argues that the principal emphasis of the global community on episodic and segmented intergovernmental negotiations as a means for addressing these concerns is misplaced, especially since the science in this area is changing rapidly, the behavior to be regulated is highly commercial and private in nature, and transnational regulation affects a wide variety of state and non-state actors who have complex motivations that change over time. At the same time, the many issues raised by biotechnology in the transnational sphere should not be left to the vagaries of the market, to governments alone, or to the initiatives of a few well-financed interest groups, such as biotechnology companies and environmentalists. Instead they need to be addressed by international society as a whole. One approach would be to establish a transnational forum on biotechnology, which could serve as a relatively informal and non-binding means for the transnational "bargaining" of views among a wide range of relevant non-state actors. Such a forum ultimately may be instrumental in achieving consensus on a coherent and effective legal regime to address concerns with transnational biotechnology, one that balances the tremendous opportunities of biotechnology against its potentially severe and adverse transnational effects.
Linguistic Confusion in Court: Evidence From the Forensic Sciences

When fingerprint evidence was approved for admission in U.S. courts in 1911, the approving court noted that “[e]xpert evidence is admissible when the witnesses offered as experts have peculiar knowledge or experience not common to the world, which renders their opinions, founded on such knowledge or experience, an aid to the court or jury in determining the questions at issue.” In other words, expert testimony is appropriate when a qualified witness has something to say that helps a fact finder in the instant case. One hundred years later, the sentiment expressed in Jennings appears in the Federal Rule of Evidence pertaining to the admissibility of expert testimony. But how can we know when expert testimony is helpful rather than unhelpful or even harmful? I submit that the specific language used in court by experts can be the difference between testimony that is truly helpful and testimony that is confusing or unhelpful. This idea is particularly germane to scientific testimony in cases where the triers of fact have a limited understanding of the principles and methods from which the testimony derives its strength.
Optimal Interventions in Markets with Adverse Selection

We study the design of interventions to stabilize financial markets plagued by adverse selection. Our contribution is to analyze the information revealed by participation decisions. Taking part in a government program carries a stigma, and outside options are mechanism dependent. We show that the efficiency of an intervention can be assessed by its impact on the market interest rate. The pres- ence of an outside market determines the nature of optimal interven- tions and the choice of financial instruments (debt guarantees in our model), but it does not affect implementation costs. (JEL D82, D86, G01, G20, G31)
The online laboratory: conducting experiments in a real labor market

Online labor markets have great potential as platforms for conducting experiments. They provide immediate access to a large and diverse subject pool, and allow researchers to control the experimental context. Online experiments, we show, can be just as valid—both internally and externally—as laboratory and field experiments, while often requiring far less money and time to design and conduct. To demonstrate their value, we use an online labor market to replicate three classic experiments. The first finds quantitative agreement between levels of cooperation in a prisoner’s dilemma played online and in the physical laboratory. The second shows—consistent with behavior in the traditional laboratory—that online subjects respond to priming by altering their choices. The third demonstrates that when an identical decision is framed differently, individuals reverse their choice, thus replicating a famed Tversky-Kahneman result. Then we conduct a field experiment showing that workers have upward-sloping labor supply curves. Finally, we analyze the challenges to online experiments, proposing methods to cope with the unique threats to validity in an online setting, and examining the conceptual issues surrounding the external validity of online results. We conclude by presenting our views on the potential role that online experiments can play within the social sciences, and then recommend software development priorities and best practices.
Natural Hedging of Life and Annuity Mortality Risks

Abstract The values of life insurance and annuity liabilities move in opposite directions in response to a change in the underlying mortality. Natural hedging utilizes this to stabilize aggregate liability cash flows. We find empirical evidence that suggests that annuity writing insurers who have more balanced business in life and annuity risks also tend to charge lower premiums than otherwise similar insurers. This indicates that insurers who have a natural hedge have a competitive advantage. In addition, we show how a mortality swap might be used to provide the benefits of natural hedging.