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Many research papers in household finance utilize annual snapshots of household wealth from administrative data, such as tax registries, to calculate "imputed consumption." However, trading costs, unobserved intrayear trades, or unobserved security characteristics may cause measurement error. We document how such errors vary across groups of individuals by income, portfolio characteristics, and wealth and how they are correlated with individual income and balance sheets, asset prices, and the business cycle using transaction-level retail brokerage account data. We find that the economic significance of imputation error is small in many research settings, and we discuss robustness checks and econometric specifications to minimize the impact of imputation error in future research. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a systematic review of 119 articles and working papers, we provide an overview of how administrative burdens in citizen–state interactions have been studied since the inception of the research agenda in 2012. We develop a new and comprehensive model of how key concepts in the framework are related, assess the evidence of the causal relationships proposed by the model, and discuss where more evidence is needed. Empirical research supports conventional claims that burdens are consequential, distributive, and constructed. However, the literature has moved further by (1) demonstrating that factors such as frontline service delivery and government communication influence experiences of burdens; (2) highlighting how factors beyond ideology influence constructions of burdens; (3) introducing the burden tolerance concept; (4) illustrating that experiences of burden influence policymakers' and members of the publics' burden tolerance. Based on the review, we propose an agenda for future administrative burden research. We call for studies linking experiences of burden to outcomes such as democratic behavior and take-up, and for studies connecting policymakers' burden tolerance to actual state actions. Moreover, we argue that future studies should use qualitative methods to further explore the nature of burdens from the perspective of citizens, rely on experimental methods to establish causal links between state actions and experiences of burden, and compare burdens across contexts. Further, empirical studies should examine the tradeoffs between legitimacy and experiences of burden, and how actors outside the citizen–state interaction may influence experiences of administrative burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the speed of rulemaking in American state governments. Drawing on a unique data set of over 250,000 individual rules issued by states from 1993 through 2009, we introduce new measures of the speed and breadth of rulemaking in American state bureaucracies, providing a new way of evaluating the incidence of rulemaking delay within and across governments. We focus specifically on how professionalism and oversight powers of state legislative and executive branches affect rulemaking speed and find that states with more professionalized legislatures and governments with extensive legislative/executive oversight powers experience greater delays in rule adoption. These findings provide important new insights into the politics of regulatory delay and suggest disparate ways in which sub-national governments approach regulatory policymaking in a federal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the common understanding, tort law is the branch of private law whose set of positive rules, institutions, and procedures aims to shift the costs of accidents from the victim to a different subject. Similar accounts of tort law are widespread and uncontested, yet they fail to do justice to the overall role tort law plays in societies. Tort law does not live in legislatures, law firms, courts, and law books only. It also lives "in the shadow" of the official system of adjudication: in the offices of insurance companies; in people's notions about injury and risk, responsibility and justice; in the languages and images associated with law in mass-generated popular culture; as well as in public debates about what values should be protected and promoted, at what costs, and at the expense of whom. On the assumption that tort law is at the same time a product and a constituent of the very cultural framework in which it is embedded, the aim of this paper is to explore its cultural dimensions in a broad comparative perspective. Combining insights from legal anthropology, socio-legal literature, legal history, and comparative law, the article tries to understand the role that, in Western and non-Western legal traditions, tort law plays in responding to, and managing social conflicts. In this perspective, the paper studies the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication process outside and inside the courtrooms, and analyzes how notions, practices, and remedies of tort law "in action" vary across different social and cultural settings. It then puts forward some conclusions about the extent to which tort law notions, ideas, concepts, categorizations, and perceptions influence and, reciprocally, are influenced by the cultural framework of which they are an expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two related decisions in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the SEC had not fully complied with some provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act when it required that the boards of investment companies managing mutual funds have at least 75% of their membership and the Chairman be independent directors. In preparation for renewed rule making, the Office of Economic Analysis of the SEC prepared a Power Study to respond to an industry-sponsored report claiming that the returns of funds with independent boards and chairs are not superior to funds with boards dominated by management. The Power Study concluded that the available studies on the effectiveness of independent board members do not have sufficient statistical power to detect a meaningful difference in the returns of the two types of funds. This paper demonstrates that the method used by the SEC in their power calculation is not correct, unless a very restrictive condition that rarely occurs in practice holds. When the appropriate power formulas are used, the expected power of studies of the same size as the ones examined by the SEC is actually lower than the corresponding results of the SEC. Thus, the results in the paper actually strengthen the argument that the SEC is advocating. The relevance of both the SEC and the industry studies to the main issue in the case is also questioned in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the relationship among the inferential style characterizing a society, its litigation system, and other aspects of its culture. Differences between common law and Continental systems of litigation are associated with a stronger individualistic tendency in Anglo‐American society than in Continental societies. William Twining's model of the ‘rationalist’ tradition in Anglo‐American adjudication and evidence scholarship, as modified by an overlay of individual rights, tracks important differences between the common law system, on the one hand, and Asian litigation systems, particularly East Asian systems, on the other, and between Western and Asian styles of thinking. The paper speculates that one reason the jury system has taken root in the Anglo‐American system is that Anglo‐American culture is more likely to generate among its people habits and customs of deliberation that will make them willing and effective jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relational turn of IR stresses the processual constitution of the state. The indigenous theory of Chinese IR adopts the relational turn but contends that the Chinese experiences are distinctive. Relying on the case of Singapore-Taiwan relationship, this paper argues that the Chinese relationality attests to a bilateral sensibility that does not confront the relational turn in general, which is multilateral. The case further contributes to the relational turn in showing non-security and affirmative components of relationality to the extent that the studies of the relational turn have remained embedded in the security concerns. The case applies the theory of "balance of relationship," in which nations can practice selfrestraint not in response to unilateral strategic calculus or multilateral rule making, but to bilateral reciprocity. The balance of relationship of the two proceeds at both the statist and the personal levels, introducing the affect of passion to the relational turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates how states manage multiple rivalries when faced with immediate threats. We argue that accommodation of one rival allows states to shift resources from the management of another rival to deal with the costs of immediate threats. By examining enduring rivalries from 1966 to 1999, we show that states' reliance on accommodation in response to threats varies depending on the number of severe threats and the relative capabilities between the states and the threat-issuing rivals. Findings show that when faced with severe but few threats, states prefer to accommodate rivals that did not issue the threat. They are also more likely to give larger concessions to such rivals and to those issuing less severe threats. Finally, the greater the military capability of a rival issuing a severe threat relative to that of the challenged state, the more likely that a threatening rival is accommodated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of balancing is of central importance in the assessment of legislative choices and in constitutional review. In conformity with the global tendency, balancing is increasingly used in judicial practice as an argumentation technique for solving legal disputes; more and more, judges of all levels ground their decisions on the balancing of individual rights, interests, principles, needs, and values. Legal science has formulated theoretical and formal models to explain the argumentation structure of balancing and the criteria governing the argumentation process, but, in the absence of a conceptual model that encompasses all elements in play and enables a comparative mechanism to be abstracted, mapping instances of judicial practice to abstract theories is still difficult. In this context, the objective of the project described here is to allow the logic of judicial practice emerge from cases, verifying from the bottom up the assumptions of theoretical models. Starting off from a broad analysis of Italian cases, the paper aims at analysing the object of this operation, i.e. what is `balanced' and what is the nature of this process. The research was conducted by analysing the so-called `massime' (case law abstracts) of the Italian High Courts (Constitutional Court, Supreme Court, Council of State) of the administrative courts (Regional Administrative Tribunals) and of a selection of lower court decisions. The methodology is divided into an initial phase of documentary collection and storage, a second phase of conceptual modelling and a third phase of data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that, in spite of recent judicial practice contributing to the integration of environmental considerations in human rights adjudication, progress in this field remains limited. This is so because of the prevailing ‘individualistic’ perspective in which human rights courts place the environmental dimension of human rights. This results in a reductionist approach which is not consistent with the inherent nature of the environment as a public good indispensable for the life and welfare of society as a whole. The article, rather than advocating the recognition of an independent right to a clean environment, presents a plea for a more imaginative approach based on the consideration of the collective-social dimension of human rights affected by environmental degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I shall essentially lay our five interpretive principles that the Hong Kong judiciary should observe. First. the Hong Kong judiciary can disable themselves from giving effect to National People's Congress (NPC) Acts that are inconsistent with the Basic Law. Second, the Court of Final Appeal has a duty to make a reference to the NPC's Standing Committee (NPCSC) when it needs to adjudicate over two conflicting Basic Law provisions, one whose affairs fall within the Central Government's concerns and the other which falls within the limits of Hong Kong's autonomy. Third, in reading the text of the NPCSC Interpretation narrowly while observing its central tenor, the Court would be respecting the plenary interpretive mandate conferred on the NPCSC while retaining its role as the primary interpreter of the Basic Law. Fourth, so far as a Mainland National Law has been formally incorporated into the Basic Law, it cannot be deemed in violation of another constitutional clause. Finally, I would argue that not all constitutional affairs falling within the limits of Hong Kong's autonomy are automatically justiciable; where there is a textual commitment to a coordinate branch of government, the Court may only interfere with the decisions made by the political branches on traditional grounds of judicial review, i.e. illegality, irrationality or procedural impropriety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of the process of drafting of decisions of the International Court of Justice from the standpoint of the Registry, showing on the basis of the author's personal recollections how the Registry contributes to the process. The question of the legal propriety of such contribution is examined, on the basis of a distinction between the task of decision, and that of expression of the decision. Some remarks are also offered on drafting techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes inspection and closure policies of a bank, and the strategic reaction of its managers/shareholders when they can (costly) manipulate the information available to the regulator. We derive optimal intervention policy, and analyze its effect on managerial strategies. Regulatory intervention may induce shareholders to manipulate the information available to the regulator in order to avoid intervention and closure, and we find that these incentives to manipulate information may increase with tighter capital requirements. Finally we show that, in order to avoid manipulation by the banker, some degree of forbearance in closure may be ex ante optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the legal process, there are fewer ubiquitous cognitive problems than is often thought. Optimal fact‐finding arrangements depend on a variety of factors, so that those intent on improving these arrangements face different problems in different procedural settings. In examining factors with a bearing on best fact‐finding practices, the author focuses first on factors that are internal to legal culture, such as the varying profile of decision‐makers, the type of proceedings, and the objectives of justice. He then explores the influence of extra‐legal factors, such as the role of political ideology, governmental structure, and the general cultural context on adjudicative fact‐finding. Special attention is given to the question of whether radically different cultural environments render their proof‐technologies discontinuous, or incommensurable. The paper ends on a cautionary note, suggesting that the absence of a suitable taxonomy of facts subject to proof makes it very difficult to apply the insights of cognitive science to factual inquiries in adjudication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the use of social characteristics and legal factors as criteria in making decisions about the detention of juveniles prior to adjudication. This research is based on data from two metropolitan courts (Denver and Memphis) that differ in their orientation to juvenile justice as well as regional location. Exploiting Goodman's method of log linear analysis to uncover relationships among categorical variables we find: (1) the major determinants of juvenile detention or release (prior to adjudication) are present activity (whether a juvenile is conventionally active or idle), prior record, and the orientation to juvenile justice held by the court; (2) there is no evidence of direct race or social class bias in the detention decision; but (3) there is some evidence for what may be viewed as a sex bias in the treatment of female youths referred for decorum offenses and males referred for property and violent offenses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article 'The Political Origins of the Administrative Procedure Act,' by McNollgast. Assertion that procedure means substance to the participants in the administrative process; Alternative explanation for the problems in McNollgast's paper concerning the Administrative Procedure Act.