cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Heterosexual Privilege and the Internal Revenue Code

The Internal Revenue Code privileges married couples in several different ways. Not only do certain rules offer economic benefit, but the rules also serve an expressive function by delivering a message about the value of marriage. Despite the existence of the marriage tax penalty and a handful of other rules that only benefit the traditional one-earner married couple, the Internal Revenue Code, on balance, privileges marriage over non-marriage, and thus privileges heterosexuality. This article identifies three distinctive harms to gay men and lesbians that result from this privileging of heterosexual marriage. They are: (1) the denial of specific tax benefits granted to married couples; (2) a stigmatic harm from failing to accord any recognition of same-sex relationships; and (3) certain consequential harms or burdens caused by rules that either ignore same-sex relationships or presume that same-sex relationships do not exist. The article then discusses specific examples of these harms, including (1) the inability of gay couples to split income, (2) the taxation of fringe benefits provided to domestic partners, (3) the taxation of gratuitous transfers, (4) the treatment of joint tenancy ownership under the estate tax, and (5) the lack of clear rules regarding property divisions when gay couples terminate their relationships. The article does not propose solutions to all of these problems. Its purpose is to broaden our understanding of the different ways in which laws privileging heterosexual marriage can cause harm to same-sex committed couples.
Legal Analysis of Economics: Solving the Problem of Rational Commitment

This Article offers a "legal analysis of economics" in contradistinction to the prevailing "economic analysis of law." The economic problem that forms the subject matter of the theoretical legal analysis is the problem of rational commitment. The difficulty here is that an agent can have a reason, or a preference, to commit to do something that he will have no reason actually to do, or which will be contrary to preference when the time comes actually to do it. Familiar examples include the problem of making credible threats or promises. This Article develops an account of the rational actor that differs from that conventionally supplied by rational choice theory to handle this problem. Borrowing from some work by the philosopher-economist John Broome, the Article argues that rational decision-making involves more than acting on the balance of reasons, or all-things-considered preferences; it also consists in following the normative requirements of practical rationality. After articulating the logical distinction between reasons and normative requirements, the Article argues that this richer account of the rational actor is manifested in common law adjudication and, more particularly, in the special relationship that exists between decided cases and defeasible legal rules. The Article suggests that this is exactly the sort of rationality that the economist needs to comprehend, and solve, the problem of rational commitment.
Paratexts as Praxis

Our essay charts out the pedagogical, technological, operational, institutional, commercial, and theoretical implications of moving from a print-based casebook paradigm to an electronic course book model. Central to this venture is what we call the Conceptions Course Book (CCB), the law school course book of the future. That e-book is, as we discuss, the end product of an entirely new and sophisticated process of creating and distributing materials (textual, audio-visual, and interactive) to be used in law school courses. This process allows professors to develop (in an I-Tunes-like manner) their own custom-designed course books in efficient, economical, and innovative ways best suited to their pedagogical concerns. Unlike proposals for computer-based e-books, our CCB would be designed to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by more advanced versions of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, or Apple’s I-Pad.
What happens during recessions, crunches and busts?

We provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles, for 21 OECD countries over the period 1960–2007. In particular, we analyse the implications of 122 recessions, 113 (28) credit contraction (crunch) episodes, 114 (28) episodes of house price declines (busts), 245 (61) episodes of equity price declines (busts), and their various overlaps in these countries, over the sample period. Our results indicate that the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables can play a major role in determining the severity and duration of a recession. Specifically, we find evidence that recessions associated with credit crunches and house price busts tend to be deeper and longer than other recessions. — Stijn Claessens, M. Ayhan Kose and Marco E. Terrones
The Influence of a Firm's Business Strategy on its Tax Aggressiveness

We examine the relation between a firm’s business and tax planning strategies. To identify firms’ business strategies we use a comprehensive measure of business strategy based on the theoretical framework of Miles and Snow (1978, 2003). Specifically, we first investigate whether a firm’s business strategy is associated with its level of tax avoidance. Next, we investigate the association between the firm’s business strategy and the extent to which it avoids tax in an aggressive manner. We find that firms following Miles and Snows’ Prospector (innovation and risk seeking) strategy avoid more taxes than both Defender firms (cost leadership and risk aversion) and firms following a more general (Analyzer) strategy. We find that Prospectors also appear to undertake more aggressive and less sustainable tax positions than Defenders. Thus, our business strategy measure appears not only to capture Prospectors’ taking advantage of tax planning opportunities that result from their innovation strategy, but also reflects their greater willingness to undertake risk and deal with uncertainty.
Implications of the Coronavirus on Sales Tax Revenue and Local Government Fiscal Health

The outbreak of COVID—19 has raised considerable alarm about public health and safety. The response to the outbreak, however, has also brought concern regarding its impact on local governments in the United States. Local governments have been a primary respondent in the fight against the COVID—19 disease, but the response has also reduced income from a key source of revenue, sales tax. Using North Carolina counties as a case study, we explore the shock to sales and use tax revenue faced by local governments from COVID—19; we, then, estimate its impact on county fiscal health. Our results show that while many local governments were financially struggling before the outbreak, the drop in sales tax revenue severely threatens their ability to provide continued response to the virus as well as their ability to remain solvent.
Scheduling Policy and Power Allocation for Federated Learning in NOMA Based MEC

Federated learning (FL) is a highly pursued machine learning technique that can train a model centrally while keeping data distributed. Distributed computation makes FL attractive for bandwidth limited applications especially in wireless communications. There can be a large number of distributed edge devices connected to a central parameter server (PS) and iteratively download/upload data from/to the PS. Due to limited bandwidth, only a subset of connected devices can be scheduled in each round. There are usually millions of parameters in the state-of-art machine learning models such as deep learning, resulting in a high computation complexity as well as a high communication burden on collecting/distributing data for training. To improve communication efficiency and make the training model converge faster, we propose a new scheduling policy and power allocation scheme using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) settings to maximize the weighted sum data rate under practical constraints during the entire learning process. NOMA allows multiple users to transmit on the same channel simultaneously. The user scheduling problem is transformed into a maximum-weight independent set problem that can be solved using graph theory. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling and power allocation scheme can help achieve a higher FL testing accuracy in NOMA based wireless networks than other existing schemes within the same learning time.
Peer coordination and communication following disaster warnings: An experimental framework

Abstract The content of official disaster warnings is often lost to peer influence in emergency situations. This is also true in evacuation decisions, where people tend to leave when others leave, leading to miscoordination and congestion. The goal of this paper is to create an experimental framework to study how peer influence mediates the process through which human participants translate disaster warnings into evacuation decisions. The main design objectives are to (1) connect the field of disaster management to behavioral and experimental economics through social dilemmas, (2) establish a baseline treatment of no social interaction to first connect individual characteristics (namely risk preferences) to beliefs and actions, (3) measure the impact of enhancing peer to peer communication on collective evacuation patterns by systematically layering communication treatments upon the baseline treatment. An investigation of whether peer to peer communication can close the gap when official evacuation instructions fail to reach all residents is included as a sample application.
Entitled to be Heard: Improving Evidence-Based Policy Making Through Audience and Public Reason

This commentary compares two conflicting affirmative action empirical studies to suggest a working model to improve evidence-based policy making in divisive democratic debates. Although Deirdre Bowen and Richard Sander’s studies conflict over their support of or opposition to affirmative action, they agree that the target audience of policies promoting or banning affirmative action is minority students. Correspondingly, affirmative action’s incidental audience is non-minority students denied admission who otherwise would have been admitted. Amidst the often noisy democratic policy debate, a policy’s audience — the people most affected — surely is entitled to be heard. A policy’s audience answers the question, “Whom precisely are you trying to benefit or burden with this policy?” Although the target audience is the primary population that the policy intends to influence directly, the incidental audience is the population that may face secondary or collateral effects as a result. Although benefits are supposed to be considered positive and desirable by the target audience and are intended to reinforce some socially constructive conduct, burdens are the opposite and may either be intended to discourage some socially unconstructive conduct by the target audience or simply be an unforeseen or unavoidable consequence affecting the incidental audience. How can policy making be dictated by the best factual evidence and for the maximum benefit of the target audience? Perhaps by requiring policy makers (1) to state publicly the intended and incidental audiences of a particular policy and (2) to scrutinize publicly available empirical evidence about those audiences before and after making policy decisions. By publicly defining their audience, opposing sides set forth their burden of proof in the public debate. In effect, the public articulation of a policy’s target and incidental audiences can implement John Rawls’ desire for public reason. Public reason — what a democracy considers legitimate policy justifications — can entail publicly available empirical evidence that a policy is actually achieving the desired effect upon its publicly announced audiences.
Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections

If the relevance gap in management research is to be narrowed, management scholars must identify and adopt processes of inquiry that simultaneously achieve high rigour and high relevance. Research approaches that strive for relevance emphasize the particular at the expense of the general and approaches that strive for rigour emphasize the general over the particular. Inquiry that attains both rigour and relevance can be found in approaches to knowledge that involve a reasoned relationship between the particular and the general. Prominent among these are the works of Ikujiro Nonaka and John Dewey. Their epistemological foundations indicate the potential for a philosophy of science and a process of inquiry that crosses epistemological lines by synthesizing the particular and the general and by utilizing experience and theory, the implicit and the explicit, and induction and deduction. These epistemologies point to characteristics of a bridging scholarship that is problem-initiated and rests on expanded standards of validity. The present epistemological reflections are in search of new communities of knowing toward the production of relevant and rigorous management knowledge.
The typical‐state paradox: diagnosing horizons with complexity

The concept of transparent and opaque horizons is defined. One example of opaqueness is the presence of a firewall. Two apparently contradictory statements are reconciled: The overwhelming number of black hole states have opaque horizons; and: All black holes formed by natural processes have transparent horizons. A diagnostic is proposed for transparency, namely that the computational complexity of the state be increasing with time. It is shown that opaque horizons are extremely unstable and that the slightest perturbation will make them transparent within a scrambling time.
Discussion of Accounting Discretion, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance

Bowen, Ragjopal, and Venkatachalam (2008) explore whether managers, on average, use accounting discretion for reporting objectives that are in the interests of shareholders (e.g., signaling, tax minimization, etc.), or alternatively whether managers use discretion opportunistically in the presence of governance structures that allow greater discretion. The authors find that although accounting discretion is positively related to governance structures that allow managers greater discretion in decision-making, there is no evidence that the portion of accounting discretion related to governance structures is negatively associated with firm performance. In this discussion, I emphasize the importance of decision rights allocation within widely held corporations, and how this allocation naturally leads to cross-sectional variation in the degree of discretion afforded managers. In contrast to much of the existing governance literature, I argue that governance structures that allow managers greater discretion in making decisions do not necessarily imply weak/poor governance. For example, it is difficult to see why a firm that allocates the least possible decision-making rights to their board or executives is necessarily the firm with highest quality governance. I also discuss why the observed relation between accounting discretion and firm performance may be uninformative about whether accounting discretion is used for opportunistic purposes. If shareholders/boards thoughtfully select an appropriate amount of overall decision-making discretion to allow managers, it will be difficult to determine whether specific types of discretion are used opportunistically.
Discussion of “Financial reporting opacity and informed trading by international institutional investors”

Abstract Maffett (this issue) finds that the opacity of a firm's information environment affects the degree of informed trade by institutional investors. In this discussion, I address the key research design choices involved in studies of opacity and informed trading and I relate the results to the literature on institutional investor performance and stock selection. I suggest that future work investigate the role of discretionary opacity in facilitating informed trade as part of the cost–benefit trade-off of the opacity decision maker (e.g., managers, analysts); test the relative effects of opacity on private information, liquidity, and price correction speed; and examine how institutional investors select which opaque firms to hold.
Money and production, and liquidity trap

We prove the existence of monetary equilibrium in a finite horizon economy with production. We also show that if agents expect the monetary authority to significantly decrease the supply of bank money available for short-term loans in the future, then the economy will fall into a liquidity trap today.
About the Initial Mass Function and He II Emission in Young Starbursts

We demonstrate that it is crucial to account for the evolution of the starburst population in order to derive reliable numbers of O stars from integrated spectra for burst ages t > 2-3 Myr. In these cases, the method of Vacca & Conti and Vacca systematically underestimates the number of O stars. Therefore, the current WR/O number ratios in Wolf-Rayet (WR) galaxies are overestimated. This questions recent claims about flat initial mass function (IMF) slopes (α ~ 1-2) in these objects. If the evolution of the burst is properly treated, we find that the observations are indeed compatible with a Salpeter IMF, in agreement with earlier studies. Including recent predictions from non-LTE, line-blanketed model atmospheres that account for stellar winds, we synthesize the nebular and WR He II λ4686 emission in young starbursts. For metallicities 1/5Z☉ ≤ Z ≤ Z☉, we predict a strong nebular He II emission due to a significant fraction of WC stars in early WR phases of the burst. For other metallicities, broad WR emission will always dominate the He II emission. Our predictions of the nebular He II intensity agree well with the observations in WR galaxies, and an important fraction of the giant H II regions where nebular He II is detected. We propose further observational tests of our result.
The Role of Inquiry-Based Learning in Entrepreneurship Education.

This paper introduces a course design that used history and inquiry-based learning to develop science students' understanding of invention, innovation and commercialization processes. First, it exp...
Judicial Impartiality in the Supreme Court: The Troubling Case of Justice Stephen Breyer

Supreme Court Justices have been ignoring the mandates of both the Due Process Clause and the Federal Disqualification Statute, repeatedly refusing to recuse themselves in cases in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Further, in response to widespread criticism of these recusal failures, Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed a committee with a skewed composition, which might well weaken recusal requirements. The committee is chaired by Justice Stephen Breyer. Breyer is a particularly inappropriate choice to head up such a committee because, both in the First Circuit and in recent cases in the Supreme Court, he has conspicuously disregarded his own recusal obligations. In short, therefore, the future of judicial impartiality in the Supreme Court looks bleak.
Artificial Intelligence’s Fair Use Crisis

As automation supplants more forms of labor, creative expression still seems like a distinctly human enterprise. This may someday change: by ingesting works of authorship as “training data,” computer programs can teach themselves to write natural prose, compose music, and generate movies. Machine learning is an artificial intelligence (“AI”) technology with immense potential and a commensurate appetite for copyrighted works. In the United States, the copyright law mechanism most likely to facilitate machine learning’s uses of protected data is the fair use doctrine. However, current fair use doctrine threatens either to derail the progress of machine learning or to disenfranchise the human creators whose work makes it possible. This Article addresses the problem in three Parts: using popular machine learning datasets and research as case studies, Part I describes how programs “learn” from corpora of copyrighted works and catalogs the legal risks of this practice. It concludes that fair use may not protect expressive machine learning applications, including the burgeoning field of natural language generation. Part II explains that applying today’s fair use doctrine to expressive machine learning will yield one of two undesirable outcomes: if U.S. courts reject the fair use defense for machine learning, valuable innovation may move to another jurisdiction or halt entirely; alternatively, if courts find the technology to be fair use, sophisticated software may divert rightful earnings from the authors of input data. This dilemma shows that fair use may no longer serve its historical purpose. Traditionally, fair use is understood to benefit the public by fostering expressive activity. Today, the doctrine increasingly serves the economic interests of powerful firms at the expense of disempowered individual rights holders. Finally, in Part III, this Article contemplates changes in doctrine and policy that could address these problems. It concludes that the United States’ interest in avoiding both prongs of AI’s fair use dilemma offers a novel justification for redistributive measures that could promote social equity alongside technological progress.
Closed-form solutions for pricing credit-risky bonds and bond options

Abstract This paper proposes closed-form solutions for pricing credit-risky discount bonds and their European call and put options in the intensity-based reduced-form framework, assuming the stochastic dynamics of both the risk-free interest rate and the credit-spread are driven by two correlated Ho–Lee models [T.S.Y. Ho, S.B. Lee, Term structure movements and pricing interest rates contingent claims, Journal of Finance 41 (5) (1986) 1011–1029]. The results are easily to implement, and require very few parameters which are directly implied from market data.
Liquidity Dynamics and Cross-Autocorrelations

This paper examines the relation between information transmission and cross-autocorrelations. We present a simple model, where informed trading is transmitted from large to small stocks with a lag. In equilibrium, large stock illiquidity induced by informed trading portends stronger cross-autocorrelations. Empirically, we find that the lead-lag relation increases with lagged large stock illiquidity. Further, the lead from large stock order flows to small stock returns is stronger when large stock spreads are higher. In addition, this lead-lag relation is stronger before macro announcements (when information-based trading is more likely) and weaker afterward (when information asymmetries are lower).
Hometown advantage: The effects of monitoring institution location on financial reporting discretion

Abstract We examine the impact of institutional ownership on financial reporting discretion, focusing on whether the impact varies with institutions' cost of acquiring monitoring information. Using geographic distance between the firm and the institutional investor as a proxy for the cost of acquiring monitoring information, we find that corporate managers are less likely to use financial reporting discretion in the presence of local monitoring institutions than distant monitoring institutions. We also find that the impact of monitoring institutions on financial reporting discretion varies with the costs and benefits of financial reporting discretion.
Growth and governance: A nonparametric analysis

According to conventional wisdom, a positive relationship exists between governance and growth. This paper reexamines this empirical relationship using nonparametric methods. We use different governance measures, as defined in World Governance Indicators provided by the World Bank. The findings show that only three of the six measures: voice and accountability, political stability, and rule of law are significantly correlated with economic growth. Regulatory control, control of corruption, and government effectiveness were found to be insignificant. The concept of growth profile curves are introduced as a visual device to interpret the results of the nonparametric analysis. We find that the empirical relationship between voice and accountability, political stability, and growth are highly nonlinear. These effects demonstrate heterogeneity across indicators, regions, and time. These empirical results are complementary to the literature on growth diagnostics in demonstrating that specific, targeted reforms to improve governance may be a more effective policy lever to encourage economic growth rather than wholesale reform. Finally, they provide a cautionary tale to practitioners using parametric methods. Journal of Comparative Economics37 (1) (2009) 121–143.
Semi-supervised learning for photometric supernova classification★

We present a semi-supervised method for photometric supernova typing. Our approach is to first use the non-linear dimension reduction technique diffusion map to detect structure in a data base of supernova light curves and subsequently employ random forest classification on a spectroscopically confirmed training set to learn a model that can predict the type of each newly observed supernova. We demonstrate that this is an effective method for supernova typing. As supernova numbers increase, our semi-supervised method efficiently utilizes this information to improve classification, a property not enjoyed by template-based methods. Applied to supernova data simulated by Kessler et al. to mimic those of the Dark Energy Survey, our methods achieve (cross-validated) 95 per cent Type Ia purity and 87 per cent Type Ia efficiency on the spectroscopic sample, but only 50 per cent Type Ia purity and 50 per cent efficiency on the photometric sample due to their spectroscopic follow-up strategy. To improve the performance on the photometric sample, we search for better spectroscopic follow-up procedures by studying the sensitivity of our machine-learned supernova classification on the specific strategy used to obtain training sets. With a fixed amount of spectroscopic follow-up time, we find that, despite collecting data on a smaller number of supernovae, deeper magnitude-limited spectroscopic surveys are better for producing training sets. For supernova Ia (II-P) typing, we obtain a 44 per cent (1 per cent) increase in purity to 72 per cent (87 per cent) and 30 per cent (162 per cent) increase in efficiency to 65 per cent (84 per cent) of the sample using a 25th (24.5th) magnitude-limited survey instead of the shallower spectroscopic sample used in the original simulations. When redshift information is available, we incorporate it into our analysis using a novel method of altering the diffusion map representation of the supernovae. Incorporating host redshifts leads to a 5 per cent improvement in Type Ia purity and 13 per cent improvement in Type Ia efficiency.
Traveling-Wave Parametric Amplifier Based on a Chain of Coupled Asymmetric SQUIDs

Since the 1980s, superconducting traveling-wave parametric amplifiers (TWPA) have promised high gain, wide bandwidth, and low noise---the ideal for astronomical detectors, or qubit readers. Actual TWPAs, though, have been plagued by insufficient gain and excessive noise, largely due to poor phase matching. The authors propose to solve these problems with an amplifier made of a chain of superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), the nonlinear behavior of which is tunable and thus allows phase matching, for high-gain amplification over a wide bandwidth.
Separating contract from governance

This paper contends that there is an important distinction between governance structure and contractual form, and that organizational boundaries, defined by governance structures, need not explain contractual form. The basic idea is that governance refers to the general environments and instruments that structure and ‘govern’ specific terms of trade negotiated in ‘contracts’. Problems of verifiability and observability of contractual performance are hypothesized to drive the differential effects on governance structure and contractual form. Specifically, transaction cost factors known to result in employment as a general governance structure do not automatically result in contracts characterized by the payment of fixed-wages. Instead, incentive pay and the delegation of decision-making authority to workers may be preferred by firm owners. The paper proposes that the relationship between a firm and a worker involves a two part decision-making framework in which one choice is the type of governance that structures the second choice regarding the specific characteristics of the contract linking the worker to the firm. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Economics of Crisis Innovation Policy: A Historical Perspective

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top U.S. science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effort, including significant investments in medical research which yielded innovations like mass-produced penicillin, antimalarials, and a flu vaccine. We draw on this episode to discuss the economics of crisis innovation. Since the objectives of crisis R&D are different than ordinary R&D (prioritizing speed, coordination, redundancy, and more), we argue that appropriate R&D policy in a crisis requires going beyond the standard Nelson-Arrow framework for research policy.
Narrowing the Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation

This Article highlights the primary tax enforcement problem in the United States, that of noncompliant small and medium-sized businesses (“SMBs”), and it explores the possibility of a radical solution: shifting away from the current system, which attempts to tax the actual income of each business, and toward a system that taxes only a rough approximation (or probabilistic estimate) of business income. This sort of presumptive tax approach has been used for years in developing economies, where the problem of SMB noncompliance is even worse than in the U.S. This Article argues that the time has come to at least consider various ways of taxing SMBs in the U.S. on a presumptive basis as well. The particular regime that the Article spends the most time developing is a type of modified gross receipts (MGR) tax of the sort that is used in some developing economies. Under our version of the MGR approach, SMB taxpayers would be taxed on a rough estimate of their annual income using (a) their reported gross receipts and (b) presumed profit ratios based on historical line-of-business profit margins. Whether such a regime would make sense depends on a number of key unanswered questions, including how narrowly and accurately such historical line-of-business profit percentages can be drawn and at what cost. We also discuss whether such a regime should be mandatory or optional; and, if mandatory, whether it should be only a mandatory minimum (like the alternative minimum tax) or both a minimum and maximum. Moving to an MGR approach to taxing SMB income would require a major change in the Internal Revenue Code. As a more modest alternative, the Article also considers instead having the IRS begin to use presumptive-tax principles as part of their audit strategies. If the Service could credibly commit to applying some form of presumptive/probabilistic tax system in its auditing decisions (perhaps as part of the Discriminate Index Function), and if taxpayers reacted rationally to such an audit policy, the results could be similar to an optional presumptive business income tax.
The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience

This paper documents the fundamental role played by factor accumulation in explaining the extraordinary postwar growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Participation rates, educational levels, and (excepting Hong Kong) investment rates have risen rapidly in all four economies. In addition, in most cases there has been a large intersectoral transfer of labor into manufacturing, which has helped fuel growth in that sector. Once one accounts for the dramatic rise in factor inputs, one arrives at estimated total factor productivity growth rates that are closely approximated by the historical performance of many of the OECD and Latin American economies. While the growth of output and manufacturing exports in the newly industrializing countries of East Asia is virtually unprecedented, the growth of total factor productivity in these economies is not.
Crop insurance in Karnataka

The authors examine the performance of the crop insurance scheme in Karnataka, a southern state of India and the second driest state in the country. Their analysis highlights weaknesses in product design, implementation challenges, and operational problems. The authors' finding is that the crop insurance scheme in its current form does not achieve its objectives, either explicit (risk management) or implicit (safety net and containment of both the central and state governments' contingent liability). The crop insurance scheme performs poorly both in terms of coverage (number of hectares insured and number of farmers purchasing insurance) and financial performance. The authors provide a framework for designing a crop insurance scheme based on the premise that insurance is a cost effective risk management techniques. They also provide some new ideas and thinking toward both improving the existing crop insurance scheme and exploring alternatives to the current product, based on an area-yield approach.
Nonprofit Resource Allocation Decisions: A Study of Marginal versus Average Spending

ABSTRACT: Economic theory suggests managers make decisions to allocate resources based on marginal analysis, regardless of how such allocations influence performance measures. Even so, anecdotal evidence suggests that managers of charities deviate from marginal analysis and respond to external pressure from donors to achieve desired performance measures, computed as average ratios of spending on program activities to total spending. We examine whether spending patterns reflect concern and donor pressure by comparing marginal and average spending patterns. We provide evidence that, in most instances, average spending patterns do not change when budgets increase. That is, average program ratios do not change when budgets grow. We find that when budgets decrease, however, charity managers make resource allocation decisions that decrease the average program ratio. This asymmetry suggests that charity managers are more willing to report declining program ratios when budgets decrease, but not improve program ra...
Relational Markets in Intimate Goods

This project analyzes how relationships create private markets and might serve as a platform in the domain of biological supply. Goodwin argues that an element of discrimination tends to accompany intimate association markets (adoption and reproductive materials), and evaluates how we should think about that. The article considers whether intimacy has a role in markets and if so, how intimacy functions with regard to supply and demand. The dual statuses of intimacy are employed here - both as a metaphor for relationships and affinity linkages (based on race, gender, or even religion), and also as the term relates to the exclusively yours: biological goods, such as kidneys, ova, sperm, and babies. Goodwin analyzes why we might desire special markets in certain intimate goods. As well, she urges a more nuanced understanding of the social impacts that result from markets based on intimate associations, including discrimination.
Countercyclical currency risk premia

We describe a novel currency investment strategy, the ‘dollar carry trade,’ which delivers large excess returns, uncorrelated with the returns on well-known carry trade strategies. Using a no-arbitrage model of exchange rates we show that these excess returns compensate U.S. investors for taking on aggregate risk by shorting the dollar in bad times, when the U.S. price of risk is high. The countercyclical variation in risk premia leads to strong return predictability: the average forward discount and U.S. industrial production growth rates forecast up to 25% of the dollar return variation at the one-year horizon. The estimated model implies that the variation in the exposure of U.S. investors to worldwide risk is the key driver of predictability.
An Alternate Functionality Reality

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl Part of the Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Commercial Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Marketing Commons, Marketing Law Commons, Sales and Merchandising Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, and the Technology and Innovation Commons
Ostrom and the lawyers: The impact of Governing the Commons on the American legal academy

American legal academics began to cite Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons (GC) shortly after its 1990 publication, with citations peaking in the mid-2000s and with signs of a new peak in 2010 in the wake of Ostrom's Nobel Prize in Economics. The legal scholars most interested in GC have worked in three areas: general property theory, environmental and natural resource law, and since the mid-1990s, intellectual property. In all those areas legal scholars have found GC and its many examples a strong source of support for the proposition that people can cooperate to overcome common pool resource issues, managing resources through informal norms rather than either individual property or coercive government. Legal academics have also been at least mildly critical of GC, however. A number have tried to balance the attractive features of GC's governance model - stability and sustainability - with more standard legal models favoring toward open markets, fluid change and egalitarianism.
A non-iterative domain decomposition method for the interaction between a fluid and a thick structure

This work focuses on the development and analysis of a partitioned numerical method for moving domain, fluid-structure interaction problems. We model the fluid using incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, and the structure using linear elasticity equations. We assume that the structure is thick, i.e., described in the same dimension as the fluid. We propose a non-iterative, domain decomposition method where the fluid and the structure sub-problems are solved separately. The method is based on generalized Robin boundary conditions, which are used in both fluid and structure sub-problems. Using energy estimates, we show that the proposed method applied to a moving domain problem is unconditionally stable. We also analyze the convergence of the method and show $\mathcal{O}(\Delta t^\frac12)$ convergence in time and optimal convergence in space. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the performance of the method. In particular, we explore the relation between the combination parameter used in the derivation of the generalized Robin boundary conditions and the accuracy of the scheme. We also compare the performance of the method to a monolithic solver.
Provision and price of child care services: For-profits and nonprofits

Abstract We study the market for child care services, with a special focus on examining competition between for- and nonprofits. We estimate a two-stage oligopoly model of product differentiation. The first stage estimates a model of endogenous market structure and the second stage corrects for market structure to examine the prices charged and capacity choices for child care centers. We find that the actions of “same-type” providers have a statistically significant impact on a provider’s entry and pricing decisions but we fail to find evidence that the actions of “other types” have a significant impact. Nonprofit child care providers and Head Start centers do not appear to crowd out for-profit providers. Further, we find that for-profits and nonprofits respond differently to market characteristics generating spatial differences in the types of center available in a market. Our data suggest that for-profits are more likely to enter markets with higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students, but they primarily serve those who work, rather than live, in the market. The prevalence of disadvantaged students does not impact the entry decision of nonprofits leaving disadvantaged areas with relatively fewer non-profit options to serve residents. Policies to encourage for-profit daycare would likely lead centers to locate in markets where they can provide service for workers, whereas a policy to encourage nonprofit entry might be more effective in providing low cost care for nearby residents.
Innovation and Incarceration: An Economic Analysis of Criminal Intellectual Property Law

The scope and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) laws are becoming salient, for the first time, to a wide cohort of U.S. and international communities. National and international legislation, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), have generated protests online and in the streets by people who are concerned about the expansion of IP rights. Common to each of these proposals was an expansion in the use of criminal sanctions to deter IP violations. Many copyright owners and the associations that represent them support criminal enforcement of IP, including the use of imprisonment, to combat the threat of increased IP piracy on the internet and throughout a globalized economy. Others, including a heterogeneous coalition of scholars, activists, and internet based companies like Google and Wikipedia, fear that using criminal sanctions to protect IP will expand already overgrown rights and chill valuable expressive and inventive behavior.
Profit Versus Prejudice: Harnessing Self-Interest to Reduce In-Group Bias

We examine the possibility that self-interest, typically thought to undermine social welfare, might reduce in-group bias. We compared the dictator game (DG), where participants unilaterally divide ...
Property and Speech

This article was part of a Symposium on The Rehnquist Court and the First Amendment, sponsored by the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. The backdrop of the article is the strong constitutional protection afforded to freedom of expression in the American constitutional system, and the article demonstrates how this strong protection has played out in the area of property and speech. The discussion of "The First Amendment as Sword" shows that the First Amendment has been asserted effectively to interfere with a property owner's use or control of intangible property and to limit the protection of an owner's property interests. The areas discussed in this section of the article are: (1) picketing and protests; (2) boycotts; (3) governmental economic regulation; (4) home solicitation; (5) 'fair use' and copyright protection; and (6) access to public property. The discussion of "The First Amendment as Shield" shows that the First Amendment has been asserted effectively to invalidate or otherwise limit permissible governmental regulation of property ownership or use by enterprises engaged in the business of expression. The areas discussed in this section of the article are: (1) regulation of sexually-oriented entertainment; (2) licensing of the business of expression; (3) billboard and sign regulation; (4) illegal conduct and the business of expression; (5) regulation of newspapers and publishers; and (6) regulation of broadcasting, cable, and the internet.The article concludes that during the Rehnquist era, as it has at least since the 1960s, the Court as an institution has demonstrated a strong commitment to the constitutional protection of freedom of expression, and this commitment has been evident in the Court's decisions in the area of property and speech.
The Fraud in the Inducement Exception to the Economic Loss Doctrine

The dividing line between contract and tort law has always been a difficult one to draw. The sale of a product generally involves two broad concerns. One concern is a private one that contracting parties can agree on the terms of a private sale within defined limits. The second concern is a public concern that the product sold not cause any injury or damage. The economic loss doctrine follows this public/private line of demarcation. The doctrine draws the line between contract and tort based on the type of damages suffered when the product does not meet contract specifications. The economic loss doctrine concludes that if a defective product causes solely economic loss, the dispute is essentially a private matter between the contracting parties and their contract should control their dispute. The public interest is not sufficiently involved to merit tort involvement. On the other hand, if a defective product causes personal injury or other property damage, then the public interest is involved and a tort approach, free of contractual limitations, is most apt. Difficulties arise, however, when one is fraudulently induced to enter into a contract for a product, and only economic loss is incurred. There is no personal injury or other property damage. How does the fraud impact where the line is drawn under the economic loss doctrine? Is the public interest sufficiently involved to invoke tort law, or is this still a private matter between private contracting parties that invokes only contract law? The states have taken a number of different positions on this issue. Most states have adopted the broad fraud in the inducement exception to the economic loss doctrine. The broad exception provides that the fraud is an intentional tort, and as such, the intentional misrepresentation is actionable as a tort, notwithstanding that the contract losses are solely economic. A small minority of states, including recently Wisconsin, has adopted the narrow fraud in the inducement exception to the economic loss doctrine. The narrow exception provides that if the fraudulent inducement relates to interwoven fraud, then the fraud is not actionable under tort law, only contract law. The only fraud actionable under the narrow fraud in the inducement exception is fraud considered to be extraneous to the contract. The purpose of this Article is to examine the narrow fraud in the inducement exception to the economic loss doctrine under Wisconsin case law, statutes, and public policy to determine if it is a sound principle.
School Closures as Education Reform: New Evidence from Chicago and Ohio

For a variety of interrelated reasons, urban public school closures are increasingly commonplace. While proponents argue that closures offer the only realistic hope of improving the academic prospe...