cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Henry Singleton: a pioneer of corporate strategic leadership and value creation

Purpose – This paper profiles the leadership and Financial Strategy principles of Dr. Henry E. Singleton, the late founder of Teledyne Corporation.Design/methodology/approach – The main sources of this paper are a private study prepared by Leon G. Cooperman, Chairman and CEO of Omega Advisors, Inc., who knew Dr. Singleton and who was a long‐term Teledyne investor, as well as a 2007 book that was published by Teledyne's former president.Findings – The leadership and financial strategy principles of Henry Singleton have broad applicability to executives across industries and to researchers across disciplines including strategy, finance, management, and entrepreneurship.Research limitations/implications – Singleton's principles, especially in the area of Financial Strategy, could be used by executives in the challenging times that likely lay ahead, and could serve as the basis for applied‐based research, most particularly case studies, on entrepreneurship, growth by acquisition, capital allocation, stock buy...
A Sour Battle in Lago Agrio and Beyond: The Metamorphosis of Transnational Litigation and the Protection of Collective Rights in Ecuador

This article intends to explore the interplay between different dispute processing mechanisms and fora in the realm of transnational litigation, through the lens of the Chevron-Ecuador legal saga. My goal is to discuss the transformation of a transnational complex case and the challenges faced by the parties, their procedural strategies, and the perceived advantages of the different mechanisms. In this regard, I will also address the development of mechanisms for the protection of diffuse rights involving the environment; the role of the courts in supervising compliance with judicial remedies, their engagement in activities that go beyond their traditional role as simple adjudicators; and the role of privately formed entities in the administration and supervision of monetary awards in Ecuador.
Probability Errors: Some Positive and Normative Implications for Tort and Contract Law

This paper examines the effect of tort rules on behavior if people are optimistic or insensitive relative to true probabilities. The paper shows that under certain conditions both strict liability and negligence cause levels of care that are higher than, or equal to, what is efficient (rather than lower, which is the common assumption). The paper also shows that under certain conditions strict liability and negligence cause the same level of activity among optimists (more than is efficient). Other implications for tort law are discussed, as are the sensitivity of the results to the choice of how to model probability errors. Implications for contract law, and some normative issues, are also discussed.
On the Determinants of Cooperation in Infinitely Repeated Games: A Survey

A growing experimental literature studies the determinants of cooperation in infinitely repeated games, tests different predictions of the theory, and suggests an empirical solution to the problem of multiple equilibria. To provide a robust description of the literature's findings, we gather and analyze a metadata set of experiments on infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma games. The experimental data show that cooperation is affected by infinite repetition and is more likely to arise when it can be supported in equilibrium. However, the fact that cooperation can be supported in equilibrium does not imply that most subjects will cooperate. High cooperation rates will emerge only when the parameters of the repeated game are such that cooperation is very robust to strategic uncertainty. We also review the results regarding the effect of imperfect monitoring, changing partners, and personal characteristics on cooperation and the strategies used to support it.
Fixing Music Copyright

In December 2012, musician Beck Hansen (Beck) released Song Reader, a concept “album” consisting of 20 unrecorded songs in sheet-music form. As one reviewer put it: “There is no CD. No download. No audio. As of this writing, you cannot hear Beck doing an authoritative, this-is-the-song performance.”1 According to the album’s publisher, “if you want to hear Do We? We Do, or Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard, bringing them to life depends on you, the reader.”2 Beck’s sheet music album was inspired by a 1937 popular music hit called “Sweet Leilani.”3 “‘Apparently, it was so popular that, by some estimates, the sheet music sold 54 million copies[.]’”4 Beck remarked that “nearly half the country had bought the sheet music for a single song, and had presumably gone through the trouble of learning to play it.”5 Beck was hoping to similarly engage his fans with Song Reader,6 and, as evidenced by the hundreds of fan performances posted on
I Swear! From Shoptalk to Social Media: The Top Ten National Labor Relations Board Profanity Cases

Two waitresses at Hooters got into a swearing match with the waitress who won a mandatory bikini competition that was rumored to have been rigged in favor of the winner. The two losers were terminated for yelling obscenities at their winning coworker in front of customers. An off duty barista at a New York Starbucks repeatedly used profanity in a heated conversation with a manager in the presence of customers, and was fired for his conduct.
Arcsecond Images of CH3CN toward W75N

CH3CN (J = 6-5) was observed with a resolution of 2'' toward W75N using the BIMA interferometer. Two continuum sources were detected at 3 mm and designated MM1 and MM2 in previous studies. Alignment of the two continuum sources with the outflow axis from MM1 suggests that these continuum sources may be the result of the outflow interacting with the interstellar medium. MM1 is coincident with compact CH3CN emission. CH3CN was not detected toward MM2. The distribution of optical depth (τL) is derived. An excitation analysis was not done because of large-line optical depths.
Trademark Law, Functional Design Features, and the Trouble with TrafFix

Part One of this article briefly defines some terms employed throughout and provides a short review of trademark principles. Parts Two and Three employ different methodologies to illuminate the functionality doctrine and the significance of Traffix. Part Two develops the etymology of important functionality standards including those considered in Traffix. It highlights links among the standards, and between the standards and evidence of functionality. Part Two's etymology suggests Part Three's economic methodology. The strength of the economic lens amplifies and simplifies the doctrine while its limitations help to explain why the functionality doctrine has been problematic and why Traffix is troublesome. After summarizing the lessons of Parts Two and Three, Part Four discusses how courts may decide functionality cases with care, reason, and sensitivity; and how Traffix may affect this process. Part Five concludes the article with thoughts concerning Traffix's future impact on trademark law and the functionality doctrine.
Club Goods and Post-Disaster Community Return *

Hurricane Katrina caused over one hundred billion dollars in property damage in the Greater New Orleans region. Although much attention has been paid to why particular communities have begun to recover and others have failed to rebound, very little attention has been paid to how the communities that have recovered actually went about doing so. This paper attempts to close that gap by examining how the church provision of "club goods" can foster social cooperation and community redevelopment in the wake of a disaster. Club goods (also known as collective goods or artificially-scarce goods) are a type of good in economics, sometimes classified as a subtype of public goods that are excludable but non-rivalrous, at least until reaching a point where congestion occurs. These goods are often provided by a natural monopoly. Examples of club goods include cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious groups to their members.) In particular, we investigate the swift return of the community surrounding the Mary Queen of Vietnam (MQVN) Catholic Church in New Orleans East after Hurricane Katrina. Utilizing a unique bundle of club goods provided by the MQVN Catholic Church, residents in the New Orleans East Vietnamese-American community (a) rebuilt their distinct ethnic— religious—language community, (b) overcame the social coordination difficulties created by Katrina, and (c) engaged in successful political action to protect their community.
BIASED SOCIAL LEARNING

This paper examines social learning when only one of the two types of decisions is observable. Because agents arrive randomly over time, and only those who invest are observed, later agents face a more complicated inference problem than in the standard model, as the absence of investment might reflect either a choice not to invest, or a lack of arrivals. We show that, as in the standard model, learning is complete if and only if signals are unbounded. If signals are bounded, cascades may occur, and whether they are more or less likely than in the standard model depends on a property of the signal distribution. If the hazard ratio of the distributions increases in the signal, it is more likely that no one invests in the standard model than in this one, and welfare is higher. Conclusions are reversed if the hazard ratio is decreasing.
When to Sell Your Idea: Theory and Evidence from the Movie Industry

I study a model of investment and sale of ideas and test its empirical implications using a novel data set from the market for original movie ideas. Consistent with the theoretical results, I find that buyers are reluctant to meet unproven sellers for early-stage ideas, which restricts sellers to either developing the ideas fully (to sell them later) or abandoning them. In contrast, experienced sellers can attract buyers at any stage, and they sell worse ideas sooner and better ideas later. These results have important managerial implications for buyers and sellers and show that, in such contexts, policy interventions that discourage buyer participation—such as stronger intellectual property protection—may diminish the market for ideas and hurt inexperienced sellers. This paper was accepted by Bruno Cassiman, business strategy.
HAC Estimation by Automated Regression

definiteness in the estimate is therefore automatically enforced, and the technique can be implemented with standard regression packages. No kernel choice is needed in practical implementation, but basis functions need to be chosen and a smoothing parameter corresponding to the number of basis functions needs to be selected. An automated approach to making this selection based on optimizing the asymptotic mean squared error is derived. The limit theory of the new estimator shows that its properties, including the convergence rate, are comparable to those of conventional HAC estimates constructed from quadratic kernels.
Biopolitics and Reproductive Justice: Fertility Policies between Women's Rights and State and Community Interests

In this Article, I argue that the liberal assumption that governments must not engage in biopolitics by setting fertility policies is flawed in both theory and practice. It is flawed in theory because government must take reproduction into account in order to ensure individual women’s rights to liberty and equality and to guarantee reproductive justice. It is flawed in practice since all governments set policies that directly and indirectly affect fertility, even if they do not name them fertility policies. Nevertheless, past and present experience have taught us that fertility policies set by states and communities to respond to their population needs have more often than not ignored the rights of the women recruited to carry them through. States have used women as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves.In order to resolve this dilemma, I offer a test for assessing the legitimacy of fertility policies. In this Article, I identify three types of interests that fertility policies may serve: legitimate state and community interests, individual liberty interests, and individual equality interests. The validity of a given fertility policy should be assessed by examining it against these interests, and two rules should guide this examination. First, fertility policies should only be based on a state’s need to promote legitimate interests (the “legitimate interests prong”). Second, due to the primacy of individual rights, even legitimate state and group interests in fertility can only be realized while respecting and promoting individual rights, especially individual women’s rights, to both liberty and equality (the “liberty and equality prong”). I will then discuss and examine various fertility policies from around the world, including the United States, in light of the suggested test.
Recommendation-Forecast Consistency and Earnings Forecast Quality

SYNOPSIS: We investigate the implications of recommendation-forecast consistency for the informativeness of stock recommendations and earnings forecasts and the quality of analysts' earnings forecasts. Stock recommendations and earnings forecasts are often issued simultaneously and evaluated jointly by investors. However, the two signals are often inconsistent with each other. Defining a recommendation-forecast pair as consistent if both of them are above or below their existing consensus, we find that 58.3 percent of recommendation-forecast pairs are consistent in our sample. We document that consistent pairs result in much stronger market reactions than inconsistent pairs. We show that analysts making consistent recommendation forecasts make more accurate and timelier forecasts than do analysts making inconsistent recommendation forecasts, suggesting that consistent analysts make higher-quality earnings forecasts. We extend the literature on informativeness of analyst research by showing that recommenda...
Agency costs, governance, and organizational forms: Evidence from the mutual fund industry

Using a comprehensive sample of mutual funds and fund families for the period 1992–2004, this study examines the impact of fund management companies’ organizational forms on the level of agency costs within mutual funds. We find that, all else being equal: (1) funds managed by public fund families charge higher fees than those managed by private fund families; (2) public fund families acquire more funds than private fund families; and (3) funds of public fund families significantly underperform funds of private fund families. Collectively, these findings suggest that agency costs are higher in mutual funds managed by public fund families. Our results are consistent with the idea that the agency conflict between the fund management company and fund shareholders is more acute for public management companies because of their shorter-term focus.
Differences in Governance Practices between U.S. and Foreign Firms: Measurement, Causes, and Consequences

We construct a firm-level governance index that increases with minority shareholder protection. Compared with U.S. matching firms, only 12.68% of foreign firms have a higher index. The value of foreign firms falls as their index decreases relative to the index of matching U.S. firms. Our results suggest that lower country-level investor protection and other country characteristics make it suboptimal for foreign firms to invest as much in governance as U.S. firms do. Overall, we find that minority shareholders benefit from governance improvements and do so partly at the expense of controlling shareholders. (JEL G32, 34, 38) Using the well-known definition from Shleifer and Vishny (1997), governance consists of the mechanisms that ensure minority shareholders receive an appropriate return on their investment. Governance depends on both country-level as well as firm-level mechanisms. The country-level governance mechanisms
Schiavone: An Un-Fortune-ate Illustration of the Supreme Court's Role As Interpreter of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Let me identify the two basic theses of this paper. First, I believe that in the recent Schiavone v. Fortune case, the Supreme Court gave the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure under consideration there, Rule 15(c), an unduly restrictive reading. In this, the fiftieth year of the effective date of the Rules, it is particularly unfortunate to see any of the Rules given an unnecessarily grudging interpretation. My second assertion is that as a general matter, in interpreting the Federal Rules, courts should recognize that their role is different from the one they play in interpreting statutes or in applying substantive common law doctrines, regardless of whether they are of a federal or state nature. In construing the Federal Rules, the courts are interpreting standards which the Supreme Court itself has promulgated. Therefore, some of the problems which occur during statutory interpretation, such as ferreting out legislative intent, deferring to another branch of the government, or avoiding violations of principles of federalism by deferring to state interests, are in large measure eliminated. As a result, the federal courts are fully justified in taking an expansive view of the Federal Rule under scrutiny, giving it a liberal reading if that is required to fulfill the purposes of the Rule or to do justice between the parties before the court.
Fairness matters-more than deterrence: Class bias and the limits of deterrence

This article is a response and commentary on an article about serious tax fraud and and noncompliance. It provides an American context on tax enforcement, noting that anti-tax and anti-IRS sentiment is high, even among "law and order" politicians. Given that the country was founded on a tax revolt (Boston Tea Party), there are limits to exemplary prosecutions not present in other countries. However, fairness sometimes requires such prosecutions to aid with voluntary compliance and legitimacy. But class bias in tax administration (and the criminal justice system more generally), undermine this goal, and analysis has avoided framing the legitimacy of the tax collection system in terms of whether that system supports a government that is perceived as working in the interests of all.
Gentle Nudges vs. Hard Shoves: Solving the Sticky Norms Problem

The resistance of law enforcers sometimes confounds the efforts of lawmakers to change social norms. Thus, as legislators expand liability for date rape, domestic violence, and drunk driving, police become less likely to arrest, prosecutors to charge, jurors to convict, and judges to sentence severely. The conspicuous resistance of these decisionmakers in turn reinforces the norms that lawmakers intended to change. Can this "sticky norms" pathology be effectively treated? It can be, this Article argues, if lawmakers apply "gentle nudges" rather than "hard shoves." When the law embodies a relatively mild degree of condemnation, the desire of most decisionmakers to discharge their civic duties will override their reluctance to enforce a law that attacks a widespread social norm. The willingness of most decisionmakers to enforce can initiate a self-reinforcing wave of condemnation, thereby allowing lawmakers to increase the severity of the law in the future without prompting resistance from most decisionmakers. The paper presents a formal model of this strategy for norm reform, illustrates it with real world examples, and identifies its normative and prescriptive implications.
Where Is Pollution Moving? Environmental Markets and Environmental Justice

Do US air pollution offset markets disproportionately relocate pollution to or from low-income or minority communities? Concerns about an equal distribution of environmental quality across communities—environmental justice—have growing policy influence. We relate prices and quantities of offset transactions to the demographics of the communities surrounding polluting plants. We find little association of offset prices or offset-induced movements in pollution with the share of a community that is Black or Hispanic or with mean household income. This analysis of 12 prominent offset markets suggests that they do not substantially increase or decrease the equity of environmental outcomes.
Prostitution control in America: Rethinking public policy

In the past two decades there has been little critical examination of the prevailing methods of controlling prostitution in the United States. This article examines selected problems in the control of prostitution in the United States and critically assesses three major alternatives to the prevailing policy of criminalization. Alternative approaches are evaluated using the criteria of public preferences, efficient use of criminal justice resources, and harm reduction. One policy, involving a dualistic approach, is found to be superior in satisfying these criteria.
Lawsuits Against the Gun Industry: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

I argue that the tort system can complement the efforts of either institutions such as markets, legislatures and administrative agencies to make public policy. Solving complex social problems typically requires the cooperation of several policymaking institutions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. My examination of lawsuits against the gun industry reveals that the tort system can and should play an active policymaking role in reducing gun violence.
Foreign direct investment and relative wages: Evidence from Mexico's maquiladoras

Abstract In this paper, we examine the increase in relative wages for skilled workers in Mexico during the 1980s. Rising wage inequality in Mexico is linked to foreign capital inflows. We study the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the skilled labor share of wages in Mexico over 1975–1988. We measure FDI using regional data on foreign assembly plants. Growth in FDI is positively correlated with the relative demand for skilled labor. In regions where FDI has concentrated, growth in FDI can account for over 50 percent of the increase in the skilled labor wage share that occurred in the late 1980s. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.
How Much Do Directors Influence Firm Value

The value a director provides to a firm is empirically difficult to establish. We estimate that value by exploiting the commonality in idiosyncratic returns of firms linked by a director and show that, on average, a directorâ€™s influence causes variation in firm value of almost 1% per year. The return commonality is not due to industry or other observable economic links. Variation in the availability of information on shared directors and a placebo test exploiting the timing of shared directors provide further identification. The results also imply that the directorial labor market does not fully assess directors in real time.Received January 19, 2018; editorial decision December 20, 2018 by Editor David Denis.
Insurgents of the Sea: Institutional and Economic Opportunities for Maritime Piracy:

While piracy may evoke romanticized visions of swashbuckling, rum swigging, and skirt chasing pirates hoisting the Jolly Roger, maritime piracy has changed substantially by taking advantage of mode...
Going Private but Staying Public: Reexamining the Effect of Sarbanes-Oxley on Firms' Going-Private Decisions

This Article examines whether the cost of complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) contributed to the rise in going-private transactions after its enactment. Prior studies of this issue generally suffer from a mistaken assumption that by goingprivate, a publicly traded firm necessarily immunizes itself from SOX. In actuality, the need to finance a going-private transaction often requires firms to issue high-yield debt securities that subject the surviving firm to SEC reporting obligations and, as a consequence, most of the substantive provisions of SOX. This Article thus explores a previously unexamined natural experiment: to the extent SOX contributed to the rise in goingprivate transactions, one should observe after 2002 a transition away from high-yield debt in the financing of going-private transactions towards other forms of “SOX-free” finance. Using a unique dataset of going-private transactions, this Article examines the financing decisions of 468 going-private transactions occurring in the eight-year period surrounding the enactment of SOX. Although SOX-free forms of subordinated debtfinancing were widely available during this period, I find no significant change in the overall rate at which firms used high-yield debt financing in structuring going-private transactions after SOX was enacted. Cross-sectional analysis, however, reveals that the use of high-yield financing marginally declined after 2002 for smalland medium-sized transactions, while significantly increasing for large-sized transactions. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the costs of SOX have disproportionately burdened small firms. They also strongly suggest that non-SOX factors were the primary impetus for the “name brand” buyouts commonly evoked as evidence that SOX has harmed the competitiveness of US capital markets.
Leasing, Ability to Repossess, and Debt Capacity †

This paper studies the role of leasing of productive assets. When capital is leased (or rented), it is more easily repossessed and hence leasing has higher debt capacity and relaxes financing constraints. However, leasing gives rise to an agency problem with regard to the care with which the leased asset is used or maintained. We show that this implies that more credit constrained firms lease capital, while less credit constrained firms buy capital. Our theory is consistent with the explanation of leasing provided by leasing firms, namely that leasing “preserves capital,” which is generally considered a fallacy in the academic literature. We provide empirical evidence that small and credit constrained firms lease a considerably larger fraction of their capital than larger and less constrained firms.
Comovement and investment banking networks

Abstract We test the hypothesis that investment banking networks affect stock prices and trading behavior. Consistent with the notion that investment banks serve as information hubs for segmented groups of investors, the stock prices of firms that use the same lead underwriter during their equity offerings tend to move together. We also find that when firms switch underwriters between their initial public offering (IPO) and a seasoned equity offering (SEO), they comove less with the stocks associated with the old bank and more with the stocks associated with the new bank. This change in comovement is greater for stocks completing their first SEO and for those experiencing large changes in institutional ownership.
THE UNEASY CASE FOR CAPITAL TAXATION

The traditional view of tax holds that consumption taxes fail to tax the yield to capital, whereas income taxes do, leading to John Stuart Mill’s criticism of the income tax as a “double tax” on wealth that is saved. A better analytic understanding illustrates that there are two types of consumption taxes. A prepaid consumption or (equivalently) wage tax indeed ignores the yield to capital. But a consistent progressive postpaid consumption tax gets at such yield, at the individual level, when but only when the returns to capital are used to elevate lifestyles in material terms. Such a tax allows ”ordinary” savings that move around labor earnings, in constant dollar terms, to different periods of an individual’s life, such as times of retirement or heightened medical or educational needs. Because a progressive postpaid consumption tax falls on the yield to capital at the right time when its use at the individual level becomes manifest all other taxes on capital, such as capital gains, gift and estate, and corporate income taxes, can and should be repealed, in the name of fairness. The Uneasy Case for Capital Taxation
Option Pricing Under a Double Exponential Jump Diffusion Model

This paper aims to extend the analytical tractability of the Black--Scholes model to alternative models with arbitrary jump size distributions. More precisely, we propose a jump diffusion model for asset prices whose jump sizes have a mixed-exponential distribution, which is a weighted average of exponential distributions but with possibly negative weights. The new model extends existing models, such as hyperexponential and double-exponential jump diffusion models, because the mixed-exponential distribution can approximate any distribution as closely as possible, including the normal distribution and various heavy-tailed distributions. The mixed-exponential jump diffusion model can lead to analytical solutions for Laplace transforms of prices and sensitivity parameters for path-dependent options such as lookback and barrier options. The Laplace transforms can be inverted via the Euler inversion algorithm. Numerical experiments indicate that the formulae are easy to implement and accurate. The analytical solutions are made possible mainly because we solve a high-order integro-differential equation explicitly. A calibration example for SPY options shows that the model can provide a reasonable fit even for options with very short maturity, such as one day. This paper was accepted by Michael Fu, stochastic models and simulation.
Beyond the Prohibition Debate: Thoughts on Federal Drug Laws in an Age of State Reforms

Nearly forty years after President Richard Nixon first declared a “war on drugs”—calling drugs the “modern curse of the youth, just like the plagues and epidemics of former years”1— it seems the war may finally be coming to an end. In his first interview after being confirmed as the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske told the Wall Street Journal that he thought it was time to retire the war rhetoric when it comes to addressing drug abuse.2 At the state level, the past year has seen proposals to legalize marijuana introduced in a handful of states with polls showing approximately forty-five percent of Americans nationwide in support of the idea.3 Importantly, these recent developments follow nearly a decade and a half of successful drug reform measures at the state level on issues ranging from medical marijuana, treatment instead of incarceration, asset forfeiture, and marijuana decriminalization. In short, the argument that we should end the war on drugs in favor of a new approach no longer resides in the world of the politically unthinkable, and has quickly become a subject of serious policy and political discussion. This article considers how we might think about federal drug laws in a post-drug war context, particularly one in which states are increasingly passing laws that are at-odds with federal law. I argue that, when it comes to federal drug law, traditional debates about prohibition, legalization, or decriminalization turn out to
Should Congestion Tolls be Set by the Government or by the Private Sector? The Knight–Pigou Debate Revisited

This paper clarifies issues debated by A. C. Pigou and Frank Knight about correcting inefficient use of congestible resources, focusing for concreteness on their original example of road congestion. Instead of governmentâ€ imposed Pigouvian access fees, Knight favoured access fees set by private tollâ€ setters. We consider the case of nâ‰¥2 congestible roads and an uncongestible road of arbitrary speed. Knight argued that in the case of a single congestible road, a private tollâ€ setter would always choose the toll that Pigou recommended, hence the allocation would minimize aggregate commute time without government meddling. We find instead that two or more tollâ€ setters would never choose Pigouvian tolls except in the special case of a sufficiently fast uncongestible road. Moreover, for uncongestible roads of slower speed, the allocation of motorists under Knight's proposal is almost never efficient. Whenever it is inefficient, motorists are strictly worse off when they pay tolls set by private firms instead of paying governmentâ€ imposed tolls, and aggregate toll revenue is also lower. Nevertheless, if the private sector does set tolls, then the full cost to motorists can be limited if the government provides an uncongestible alternative, such as a train, to offer potential competition along the same route.
Assessor Incentives and Property Assessment.

While typically not a formulator of policy, property assessors are likely sensitive to political incentives, since they are either directly elected to their office or appointed by another elected official. This article estimates a model that is motivated by the assumption that assessors seek to maximize political support in a manner that affects the assessment-to-sales price ratio. With panel data from a 2001 to 2006 series of sales price ratio studies in Virginia cities and counties, a fixed effects variance-decomposition regression reveals a variety of socioeconomic and political variables that bias the assessed value away from fair market value. In addition to finding influential socioeconomic factors, the results indicate that elected assessors underassess more than appointed assessors. Furthermore, it appears assessors try to export the property tax onto commercial property, and assessors in districts with higher measures of local government fiscal stress tend to give higher assessments.
Municipal Constitutional Rights: A New Approach

American law long held that the Constitution does not limit state power over municipalities, a doctrine exemplified by Hunter v. Pittsburgh. While the Supreme Court has made some moves to update this doctrine in light of the Reconstruction Amendments and the constitutional rights revolution, those moves have been minimal enough to obtain uneven recognition from the Courts of Appeal, and a recent Supreme Court decision suggests a possible return to the ancien regime. I argue that the problem is that Hunter’s reach today is determined by its dicta, not its purpose, which courts have forgotten. Hunter’s purpose should be to preserve state policy flexibility, which means that state grants of municipal powers are not constitutionally enshrined as property or contract. This leaves room for municipal residents and municipalities themselves to invoke the Constitution against their creating states when individual rights or federal regulatory regimes are at stake. It even leaves for municipalities themselves to claim constitutional rights. One such candidate is free speech rights. I also discuss suits between municipalities.
Adverse Selection, Slow Moving Capital and Misallocation.

We embed adverse selection into a dynamic, general equilibrium model with heterogeneous capital and study its implications for aggregate dynamics. The friction leads to delays in firms’ divestment decisions and thus slow recoveries from shocks, even when these shocks do not affect the economy’s potential output. The impediments to reallocation increase with the dispersion in productivity and decrease with the interest rate, the frequency of sectoral shocks, and households’ consumption smoothing motives. When households are risk averse, delaying reallocation serves as a hedge against future shocks, which can lead to persistent misallocation. Our model also provides a micro-foundation for convex adjustment costs and a link between the nature of these costs and the underlying economic environment.
Robust Inference of Risks of Large Portfolios.

Abstract We propose a bootstrap-based robust high-confidence level upper bound (Robust H-CLUB) for assessing the risks of large portfolios. The proposed approach exploits rank-based and quantile-based estimators, and can be viewed as a robust extension of the H-CLUB procedure (Fan et al., 2015). Such an extension allows us to handle possibly misspecified models and heavy-tailed data, which are stylized features in financial returns. Under mixing conditions, we analyze the proposed approach and demonstrate its advantage over H-CLUB. We further provide thorough numerical results to back up the developed theory, and also apply the proposed method to analyze a stock market dataset.
Searching for constitutional meaning in institutional design: The debate over judicial appointments in the United Kingdom

The United Kingdom is experiencing a period of dramatic constitutional change. A spate of reforms ushered in by the Blair government at the turn of the twenty-first century challenged conventional notions of British governance and constitutional structure. In the shadow of these changes, one new and bedeviling institutional task is to reconcile an independent judicial branch, growing in power, with a system of parliamentary sovereignty. This article will analyze the debate over judicial appointments in order to shed light on the position of the modern British judiciary, and the new UK Supreme Court in particular, within the British constitutional system. Questions of institutional design expose deep divisions over the perceived extent of judicial power, the relationship of the judiciary to Parliament, and the constitutional justifications for diversity on the bench. Although a weak consensus was achieved in the Crime & Courts Act 2013, stability in the appointments regime is likely temporary. The contested nature of the modern British constitutional system will ensure ongoing debate.
No strings attached: When giving it away versus making them pay reduces consumer information disclosure

Abstract We examine egocentric biases in mental accounting that occur when consumers face the prospect of disclosing personal information in exchange for online marketing incentives. We find that consumers keep balanced “mental accounts” of the costs and benefits of such exchanges when they are contingent or temporally integrated. However, when non-contingent exchanges are temporally separated so that benefits precede costs, or when bias correction is impeded in the same non-contingent transaction, consumers keep separate mental accounts in which they egocentrically devalue the marketers' incentives, making them less likely to reciprocate by disclosing. We explore consequences of these findings for online relationships between consumers and marketers.
INCENTIVES TO INNOVATE AND FINANCIAL CRISES

Abstract In this paper I develop a model of a competitive financial system with unrestricted but costly entry and an endogenously determined number of competing financial institutions (“banks” for short). Banks can make standard loans on which plentiful historical data are available and unanimous agreement exists on default probabilities. Or banks can innovate and make new loans on which limited historical data are available, leading to possible disagreement over default probabilities. In equilibrium, banks make zero profits on standard loans and positive profits on innovative loans, which engenders innovation incentives for banks. But innovation brings with it the risk that investors could disagree with the bank that the loan is worthy of continued funding and hence could withdraw funding at an interim stage, precipitating a financial crisis. The degree of innovation in the financial system is determined by this trade-off. Welfare implications of financial innovation and mechanisms to reduce the probability of crises are discussed.
A Textbook Dilemma: Should the First Sale Doctrine Provide a Valid Defense for Foreign-Made Goods?

In John Wiley & Sons Inc. v. Kirtsaeng, the Second Circuit held that the statutory language of the first sale doctrine, specifically the words “lawfully made under this title,” does not extend the first sale safe harbor to copies made outside of the United States. This holding rendered it unnecessary to consider whether the anti-importation provision applies. In so doing, the Second Circuit relied on its reading of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Costco v. Omega. prohibits the unauthorized importation of a copyrighted work. What happens if someone buys a copy of a work outside of the United States, brings the copy into the United States, and then tries to sell it? Does the “first sale” doctrine apply, so that the foreign copy can be sold in the United States? Or does the anti-importation provision control? If it does, the seller would not be able to invoke the “first sale” safe harbor and would be liable under federal copyright law if she did not obtain the copyright holder’s authorization for the U.S. sale.
The Impact of Medical Liability Standards on Regional Variations in Physician Behavior: Evidence from the Adoption of National-Standard Rules

I explore the association between regional variations in physician behavior and the geographical scope of malpractice standards of care. I estimate a 30–50 percent reduction in the gap between state and national utilization rates of various treatments and diagnostic procedures following the adoption of a rule requiring physicians to follow national, as opposed to local, standards. These findings suggest that standardization in malpractice law may lead to greater standardization in practices and, more generally, that physicians may indeed adhere to specific liability standards. In connection with the estimated convergence in practices, I observe no associated changes in patient health. (JEL I11, I18, J44, K13) A large literature in health economics and medicine has explored the regional practice patterns of physicians and other medical providers and has endeavored to understand (i) why some regions spend so much in the care of patients relative to other regions and (ii) whether high-spending regions generate superior health outcomes. In this paper, I explore a potential contribution to the observed disparities in care that has been suggested by leading theoretical scholars in the area-variations literature (Phelps 1992), but that has yet to be explored empirically: laws respecting the geographical nature of the standards of care employed in medical malpractice actions. In addition to shedding potentially valuable light on each of the above puzzles, this investigation may, at the same time, offer novel insight into the fundamental question of whether physicians are responsive to the specific standards expected of them under the law. A common thread that emerges throughout those studies that have endeavored to explore the causes behind the regional variations phenomenon is the inability
Bankruptcy Reform: What's Tax Got to Do with It

When Congress passed sweeping bankruptcy reform legislation in 2005, it failed to resolve a number of important issues in the area of bankruptcy taxation, a critical but often overlooked area of bankruptcy law. This article addresses one such issue, the tax consequences of property abandonments in a bankruptcy proceeding. It deals with how to treat the gain that accrues with respect to an asset after a debtor files for bankruptcy protection. The article takes a two-pronged approach to the issue. First, it argues that all post-petition appreciation should be taxed to the debtor rather than to the debtor's bankruptcy estate because the debtor enjoys the benefits of the asset's appreciation in value and because, from a tax perspective, the results will be identical irrespective of whether the debtor or the bankruptcy estate is taxed on the asset's post-petition appreciation. Second, the article proposes that the gain accruing before the termination of the bankruptcy proceeding be treated as discharge of indebtedness income so that the debtor can defer recognition of the gain until she is better able to pay the resulting tax. The article concludes that congressional adoption of this proposal will harmonize competing tax and bankruptcy policies and ultimately improve the bankruptcy system.
Dear Lawyer Bao : Everyday Problems, Legal Advice, and State Power in China

This article presents findings from a content analysis of all 460 “Dear Lawyer Bao” (DLB) legal advice columns published in its ten-year history (1989‐98) in the Beijing Evening News. While much sociolegal research has focused on the exercise of power in the legal process through the control of meaning in verbal, private face-to-face interactions, this article reveals similar meaning-making processes at play in publicly disseminated writing where the audience is far larger, the potential impact far wider, and the role of the state far greater. Lawyer Bao’s popular image as valiant defender of ordinary people in trouble obscured and thus enhanced both the degree to which he was beholden to the state and the effectiveness with which he did the bidding of the state against the interests of the very letter-writers he purported to help. His ultimate allegiance to the state is reflected in two empirical patterns. First, the temporal distribution of problem topics featured in the DLB column corresponds less to shifts in public sentiment or objective popular needs and more to legislation, policy shifts, and political campaigns. Second, whether Lawyer Bao legitimized or delegitimized letter-writers’ claims was determined primarily by the extent to which state interests were at stake in the problem at hand. Lawyer Bao tended to delegitimize labor grievances, housing demolition grievances, collective grievances of any kind, and other claims construed as potentially destabilizing or of challenge to state priorities. Keywords: Chinese law, lawyers, legal consciousness, legal culture, media frames. For ten years newspaper readers in Beijing engaged the state by engaging Lawyer Bao, a legal advice columnist in the Beijing Evening News ( BEN ). In its ten-year history between 1989 and 1998, the Dear Lawyer Bao (DLB) column served as a weekly forum for the articulation of everyday grievances directed not only against other individuals but also against state actors, state organizations, and state policies. In a context in which legal institutions have been rebuilt largely from scratch since 1979 (Alford 1999; Lubman 1999; Peerenboom 2002), Lawyer Bao’s official mandate was to educate ordinary people about China’s rapidly developing legal system and to encourage its use. How has the Chinese state endeavored to adapt to such a rapidly transforming institutional environment in which the expansion and popular mobilization of the legal system poses a potential challenge to the political supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? We will see that meaning-making efforts in the mass media are an important part of the state’s strategy. Results I present in this article of a content analysis of all 460 DLB columns contribute to three interrelated research literatures. First, this article contributes to sociolegal research on how lawyers exercise power through the control of legal meaning (Cain 1979; Hosticka 1979; Kritzer 1998; Mather, McEwen, and Maiman 2001; Mather and
Strategic Issues Management: An Integration of Issue Life Cycle Perspectives

This paper explores, in depth models of issues management and uses public policy, corporate strategy, process models and multiple perspectives to understand the evolution of issues management and how organizations can strategically respond to, and manage, issues. The paper concludes with empirical considerations and a research agenda for the future.
An Alternative Approach to Distinguishing Liabilities from Equity

In response to a longstanding debate within the accounting profession on how to clearly distinguish liabilities from equity, we offer an alternative liability-equity classification scheme (the “Earned Capital Approach”) in which capital acquired in exchange for issuing claims (“external capital”) is classified as liabilities and capital acquired in exchange for providing goods and services (“earned capital”) is classified as equity. The Earned Capital Approach differs from the approach underlying current financial reporting standards in that it is based on a fundamental distinction between the firm and its claimants rather than a distinction between types of claimants (e.g., owners versus creditors). In this paper, we summarize the accounting profession’s ongoing attempts to distinguish liabilities from equity and discuss the conceptual underpinnings and financial reporting implications of the Earned Capital Approach.