Digital Commons Network^™

Why Do Corporations Donate? An Analysis Of Factors Affecting Corporate Philanthropy, Patrick Luensmann

Honors Program Theses

The purpose is to determine the influence of measureable economic variables on corporate philanthropy among the top 30 American companies between 2007 and 2009. The significant variables in the model, with a 10% significance level, are Net Income, Assets, Financial Leverage, PE Ratio, and Profit Margin. The model can account for 87.41% of the change between the two years.

"The Effect Of Basic Financial Literacy On Choice Of College Major": A Study Of Accounting And Education Majors At A Four-Year University In The Midwest, Austin Prescott Foster

Honors Program Theses

Previous studies have been done to gauge the level of financial literacy possessed by various cultural sub-groups, what students in different majors see as the driving forces behind what they want their career to be, and income inequalities between jobs. There is currently a gap in the literature with respect to whether knowing the yearly income of one's parent(s) plays a significant role in major choice. This research was conducted to determine whether disclosure of yearly income by parents influences their child's choice of college major.

The "Gateway" Problem In International Commercial Arbitration, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

Participants in international commercial arbitration have long recognized the need to maintain arbitration as an effective and therefore attractive alternative to litigation, while still ensuring that its use is predicated on the consent of the parties and that the resulting awards command respect. A priori, at least, all participants – parties, counsel, arbitrators, arbitral institutions – have an interest in ensuring that arbitration delivers the various advantages associated with it, notably speed, economy, informality, technical expertise, and avoidance of national fora, while producing awards that withstand judicial challenge and otherwise enjoy legitimacy.

National courts play a potentially important policing role …

The Law And Economics Of Fluctuating Criminal Tendencies And Incapacitation, Murat C. Mungan

Faculty Scholarship

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders.

In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only …

Intuition And Feminist Constitutionalism, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In any constitutional system, we must ask, as a foundational inquiry, when and why a government may distinguish between groups of constituents for purposes of allocating benefits or imposing penalties. For feminists and others with a stake in challenging inequalities, the rationales that a society deems acceptable for justifying these classifications are centrally important. Heightened scrutiny jurisprudence for sex-based and other distinctions may help capture some of the rationales that rest on stereotypes and outmoded biases. However, at the end of the day, whatever level of scrutiny is applied, the critical question at any level of review is whether, according …

Sovereign Wealth Funds And Global Finance, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter focuses on a number of specific sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) whose portfolios indicate strong interests in finance both in their home countries and abroad. It first reviews empirical evidence that shows SWFs having been major investors in Western financial intermediaries for decades. It then considers the organization and governance of SWFs, with particular emphasis on the three main schools of thought as well as the predictions one can derive from them vis-à-vis the behavior of individual actors in the global financial network: economic theories, economic sociology, and political economy. It also presents case studies that “test” these theories …

Arbitration In The Roberts Supreme Court, George A. Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s most recent set of arbitration law rulings — Stolt-Nielsen, S.A. v. AnimalFeeds Int’l, Rent-A-Center West v. Jackson, and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion — merits all the attention it has been receiving. Taken collectively, the three decisions evidence the powerful commitment of a Supreme Court majority to arbitration as an alternative form of dispute resolution — a commitment so strong as to override important consumer welfare interests. At a minimum, the trilogy erects substantial barriers to the conduct of class arbitration, a form of arbitration that consumer advocates regard as essential to protecting consumer welfare.

In …

The Obligatory Structure Of Copyright Law: Unbundling The Wrong Of Copying, Shyamkrishna Balganesh

Faculty Scholarship

Courts and scholars today understand and discuss the institution of copyright in wholly instrumental terms. Indeed, given the forms of analysis that they routinely employ, one might be forgiven for thinking that copyright is nothing more than a comprehensive government-administered scheme for encouraging the production of creative expression and is therefore quite legitimately the subject matter of public law. While this instrumental focus may have the beneficial effect of limiting copyright’s unending expansion, it also serves as a source of distraction. It directs attention away from the reality that copyright is fundamentally a creation of the law and is thus …

Property As Modularity, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Henry Smith’s Property as the Law of Things urges a return to an older conception of property as rights with respect to things – and justifies this in terms of a very new conception of property based on modularity. Throughout, he highlights the importance of information costs in determining the structure of property law, starting with a baseline of in rem rights of exclusion supplemented by governance rules to deal with exceptional situations. I fully agree with his emphasis on the centrality of things in the law of property, the in rem nature of property, the primacy of exclusion …

Securities Class Actions Against Foreign Issuers, Merritt B. Fox

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the fundamental question of whether, as a matter of good policy, it is ever appropriate that a foreign issuer be subject to the U.S. fraud-on-the-market private damages class action liability regime, and, if so, by what kinds of claimants and under what circumstances. The bulk of payouts under the U.S. securities laws arise out of fraud-on-the-market class actions – actions against issuers on behalf of secondary market purchasers of their shares for trading losses suffered as a result of issuer misstatements in violation of Rule 10b-5. In the first decade of this century, foreign issuers became frequent …

Affirmative Action In Higher Education Symposium: Comment, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

This issue – affirmative action in higher education – is an issue of enormous significance for the country. So I don't for a second treat this as just another conversation about an important legal question. I think this is one of those issues that define the country.

I'll tell you what I did as President of the University of Michigan, and in the course of that I'll try to explain the ways in which we formulated the cases that went to the Supreme Court and resulted in very important clarifications to the Fourteenth Amendment and affirmative action. Then I want …

Neuroscience And The Child Welfare System, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly, scholars and policymakers are calling for programs that take a preventive approach to child abuse and neglect, rather than our current tendency to respond only after a crisis. There are significant social and economic arguments supporting this shift. The Nurse-Family Partnership, developed by David Olds and discussed in this symposium, illustrates how specific investments in family functioning can lower rates of child abuse and neglect, leading to a host of positive outcomes for children and society, from greater educational attainment to less involvement in the criminal justice system. Thinking about child well-being more broadly, the Nobel laureate James Heckman …

Federalizing Fiduciary Duty: The Altered Scope Of Officer Fiduciary Duty Following Orderly Liquidation Under Dodd-Frank, Dorothy S. Lund

Faculty Scholarship

The financial crisis of 2008 ushered in a new era of regulatory reform in the United States. The failure of several large banks prompted Congressional scrutiny ofthe U.S. bank regulatory system. Many critics highlighted the government's failure to intervene to prevent Lehman Brothers' insolvency, which resulted in economic turmoil not yet resolved. Against this backdrop, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ("Dodd-Frank") in July 2010.

Dodd-Frank mandates institutional changes to minimize economic instability and establishes regulatory processes to guide the government's response to future bank failures. At the heart of the regulation is the Orderly …

Automatic Document Classification In Small Environments, Jonathan David Mcelroy

Master's Theses

Document classification is used to sort and label documents. This gives users quicker access to relevant data. Users that work with large inflow of documents spend time filing and categorizing them to allow for easier procurement. The Automatic Classification and Document Filing (ACDF) system proposed here is designed to allow users working with files or documents to rely on the system to classify and store them with little manual attention. By using a system built on Hidden Markov Models, the documents in a smaller desktop environment are categorized with better results than the traditional Naive Bayes implementation of classification.

Dating The State: The Moral Hazards Of Winning Gay Rights, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

On August 1, 2009, a masked man dressed in black carrying an automatic weapon stormed into Beit Pazi in Tel Aviv, the home of the Aguda, the National Association of GLBT in Israel. He opened fire on a group of gay and lesbian teenagers who were meeting in the basement for "Bar-Noar," or "Youth Bar," killing two people and wounding at least ten others. This terrible act of violence attracted immediate national and international attention and condemnation. President Simon Peres declared the next day:

[T]he shocking murder carried out in Tel Aviv yesterday against youths and young people is a …

Accountability And The Bureau Of Consumer Financial Protection, Susan Block-Lieb

Faculty Scholarship

Some industry and political actors oppose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on the grounds that its institutional design ensures its lack of accountability. Specifically, opponents point to the CFPB’s regulatory and financial independence and to the fact that a single director heads the Bureau rather than a bipartisan panel of commissioners. But to focus on the Bureau’s financial independence and single director misses the distinctive political deal struck when Congress created the CFPB. The CFPB has been uniquely and intentionally structured to insulate it not only from interest group influence and executive interference, but also from congressional control, while …

Reversible Rewards, Omri Ben-Shahar, Anu Bradford

Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a new mechanism of private enforcement, combining sanctions and rewards into a scheme of “reversible rewards.” The enforcing party sets up a precommitted fund and offers it as reward to another party to refrain from violation. If the violator turns down the reward, the enforcer can use the money in the fund for one purpose only – to pay for punishment of the violator. The article shows that this scheme doubles the effect of funds invested in enforcement and allows the enforcer to stop violations that would otherwise be too costly to deter. It argues that reversible …

Effect Of Silicon On Plant Growth And Drought Stress Tolerance, Kaerlek W. Janislampi

Publications

Silicon is not considered an essential nutrient, but it is typically abundant in soils and can be taken up in large amounts by plants. Silicon is known to have beneficial effects when added to rice and several other plants. These effects include disease and insect resistance, structural fortification, and regulation of the uptake of other ions. In this study, the effect of silicic acid fertilization on the growth and drought tolerance of four crop plants (corn, wheat, soybean, and rice) was analyzed. Plants were studied using three cultivation techniques: 1) hydroponic solution and subjected to salt stress, 2) low-silicon soil-less …

Is Europe Headed Down The Primrose Path With Mandatory Mediation, Jacqueline Nolan-Haley

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Eparpillement Aux Quatre Vents: La Fragmentation Du Droit Du Sport, Giovanni Distefano, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Scattering to the Four Winds: The Fragmentation of Sports Law

Sports Law is characterized by a multiplicity of sources: from the outset, law-making function was mainly carried out by different and competent sports associations (both national and international). Two major events have wreaked havoc: on one side, the ever-increasing professionalization of sports business has given birth to the outcrop of private associations – active in a sort of grey and undefined area – torn between public authority ans free market; on the other side, international federations have been called upon to manage those same associations. Lack of institutional and substantive …

One (Firm) Is Not Enough: A Legal-Economic Analysis Of Ec-Fasteners, Chad P. Brown, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO’s Appellate Body (AB) dealt with a number of issues for the first time in the Report of EC-Fasteners. Importantly, the AB discussed the consistency of the European Union (EU) regulation with the multilateral rules on the conditions for deviating from the obligation to calculate individual dumping margins. Although China formally won the argument, the AB may have opened the door to treat China as a non-market economy (NME) even beyond 2016 when China’s NME-status was thought to expire under the terms of China’s 2001 WTO Accession Protocol. The AB further dealt with numerous other issues ranging from statistical …

The Legal And Economic Principles Of World Trade Law: National Treatment, Gene M. Grossman, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The primary objective of most trade agreements is to restrain members' use of trade policies for protectionist purposes. But it would be pointless to restrict the application of border instruments without regulating the possible use of domestic policies for protectionist purpose. To this end, most agreements include an obligation for National Treatment (NT) of foreign products. The NT provision in the GATT appears in Art. III, which applies to most government actions that have impact trade. It requires that imported products be treated as favorably by domestic policy as similar, indigenous products. This study offers suggestions based on legal and …

Strategic Communication In Women's Rights Organizations: Tools, Challenges And Best Practices, Anastasia Kalinina

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Despite rapid globalization and tremendous expansion of the number of women's rights organizations, international attention to the issues of women and girls remains rather low. While some women's rights networks and organizations leap to prominence, others do not receive recognition and public support. I wanted to know why. I interviewed 13 directors and communication managers of women's rights non-governmental organizations to see how they manage communication. I used a convenience sample that included a wide range of geographical locations and sizes of NGOs. The interviews were held via Skype. I conducted a theme analysis of transcribed interviews. The participants indicated …

A Novel Method Of Studying Ion Formation And Fragmentation Using A Modified Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer, David S. Ames

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Laser desorption has been an important tool in mass spectrometry. It has been known that an order of magnitude more neutrals than ions are produced during laser desorption. A Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer with an infinitely adjustable acceleration region was constructed to map the population distribution of neutral ion precursors and metastable ions in the flight tube. Desorption was performed by using a nitrogen UV laser at 337 nm. Experiments conclude that the majority of post-source ionization of neutrals occurs approximately 2.5 cm from the sample-laser interface. The intensity of ions tapers rapidly out to 6.0 cm, however ions were detected …

Analysis Of Covert Software Behavior, Zhen Huo

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In general, users are isolated from the inner-workings of software. The behavior of software is analogous to a "black box," performing user-directed tasks in a predictable way. But this isolation of the inner-workings can foster both curiosity and suspicion of the goings-on "under the hood," especially when the software is closed-source, as is the case with a majority of commercial software. When talking about behaviors of software from the outside perspective of the end user, concerns are raised about issues including memory leaks, data integrity, confidential, etc. This paper discusses several techniques for scrutinizing and eliciting covert behavior of applications …

A Wave Frozen In Bone And Flesh, Tiffany L. Bullen

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

"A Wave Frozen in Bone and Flesh" is a collection of 43 poems.

Love And War, Christina D. Ponsa-Kraus

Faculty Scholarship

Legal historians: Find a window to read Rose Cuison Villazor’s “The Other Loving,” published in the NYU Law Review last fall. Although Villazor, Associate Professor of Law at Hofstra, does not identify primarily as a legal historian, she has written more than one historical work well worth a read. An earlier article examined alien land laws in the United States, telling the story of Oyama v. California (1948), which held unconstitutional a provision of California’s Alien Land Law that discriminated against owners of property bought by parents who were ineligible to become U.S. citizens. This more recent article, in …

Science Heads List Of Candidate Debate Queries, Michael B. Gerrard

Faculty Scholarship

Policy on the environment, energy, and natural resources has seldom figured prominently in a presidential election, all the less so as time elapses since the first Earth Day. To judge by the more than twenty debates thus far in the current presidential campaign, it isn’t likely to be on top of the agenda this year. Although regulation itself has been featured in the campaign – recall the criticism of the new lightbulb efficiency standards and of the Solyndra bankruptcy, not to mention rejection of climate change science – broader topics in environmental policy have largely taken a back seat to …

General Equilibrium Effects Of Prison On Crime: Evidence From International Comparisons, Justin Mccrary, Sarath Sanga

Faculty Scholarship

We compare crime and incarceration rates over time for the United States, Canada, and England and Wales, as well as for a small selection of comparison countries. Shifts in U.S. punishment policy led to a five-fold increase in the incarceration rate, while nearly every other country experienced only minor increases in incarceration. The large shifts in U.S. punishment policy do not seem to have caused commensurately large improvements in public safety.

Life Begins With Faith: Poems And Meditations, George William Wiseman

Books

No abstract provided.