Tang, Aaron, Public Sector Unions & the First Amendment after Harris v. Quinn and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (March 28, 2015). New York University Law Review, Forthcoming. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2586491 “When the Supreme Court struck down the so-called contraceptive mandate in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, it rested its ruling on the… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: March 2015
Majority of Hires Never Report Looking for a Job
Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, Bart Hobijn, Patryk Perkowski, and Ludo Visschers – “Every month, millions of workers search for new jobs although they already have one. About one-tenth of these searchers switch employers in the following month. However, most of the job switchers in the United States never reported having looked for a job. This implies that,… Continue Reading
Salon – Subprime loans are coming to financial aid
Jeff Bryant – “Wall Street wants to own your education destiny. To the old saying about “death and taxes,” you can now add another: debt. In fact, in contemporary America, debt is likely becoming at least as all-encompassing as the other two. An increasingly powerful force behind the debt explosion is not what you might… Continue Reading
The Gender Gap in Mathematics: Evidence from a Middle-Income Country
Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, David Hansen, and Christopher Neilson: “Using a large administrative data set from Chile, we find that, on average, boys perform better than girls in mathematics. In this paper, we document several features of their relative performance. First, we note that the gender gap appears to increase with age (it doubles between fourth grade and… Continue Reading
CFPB Takes Action Against “Bad Check” Debt Collector
“Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced an enforcement action against a nationwide debt collection operation and its chief executive officer for using deceptive threats of criminal prosecution and jail time in order to intimidate consumers into paying debts for bounced checks. The company also misled consumers into believing that they must enroll in… Continue Reading
Pricing Freight Transport to Account for External Costs: Working Paper 2015-03
By David Austin (CBO) – “Although freight transport contributes significantly to the productivity of the U.S. economy, it also involves sizable costs to society. Those costs include wear and tear on roads and bridges; delays caused by traffic congestion; injuries, fatalities, and property damage from accidents; and harmful effects from exhaust emissions. No one pays… Continue Reading
What Went Wrong with the FISA Court
Brennan Center for Justice – What Went Wrong with the FISA Court by Elizabeth (Liza) Goitein, Faiza Patel, March 18, 2015. “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court is no longer serving its constitutional function of providing a check on the executive branch’s ability to obtain Americans’ private communications. Dramatic shifts in technology and law have… Continue Reading
Federal Student Aid – Loan Servicing Information Report
“Per the contractual agreement with each of our federal loan servicers, the Department of Education (the Department) will annually measure servicer performance in the areas of customer satisfaction and default prevention. We will then use these results to determine each servicer’s allocation of future loan volume when applicable. This announcement is intended to share the… Continue Reading
Senate Select Committee on Ethics: A Brief History of Its Evolution and Jurisdiction
Senate Select Committee on Ethics: A Brief History of Its Evolution and Jurisdiction, Jacob R. Straus, Analyst on the Congress. January 13, 2015. “The United States Constitution provides each House of Congress with the sole authority to establish rules and punish and expel Members. From 1789 to 1964, the Senate dealt individually with cases of… Continue Reading
The Effect of Probability and Uncertainty Models on Hedge Fund Performance Analysis
Muteba Mwamba, John Weirstrastrass, The Effect of Probability and Uncertainty Models on Hedge Fund Performance Analysis (2014). The Journal of Applied Business Research, September/October 2014 Volume 30, Number 5. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2586164 “This paper implements two types of framework to investigate the outperformance, selectivity and market timing skills in hedge funds: uncertainty… Continue Reading
CEO Cognition in Strategy Research
Chanda, Sasanka Sekhar, CEO Cognition in Strategy Research (March 27, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2586215 “Cognitive considerations arising from the functions of the Chief Executive Officer appear to have been ignored in strategy research. Taking a cue from Freeman’s stakeholder theory, I discuss the constituencies addressed by the CEO in performing his/her job… Continue Reading
Ken Burns new PBS documentary on Cancer
Fortune: “Cancer is the fastest growing disease on Earth. It plagues nearly 1.7 million Americans each year, and over the next two years it’s expected that more people will die from the disease than were killed in combat in all the wars the U.S. has fought — combined. These facts set the stage for the… Continue Reading
