The Telecommunications Act of 1996 promised the world. It has would "promote competition and reduce regulation," "secure lower prices and bigher quality services... and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies." On its first occasion to review the Act's provisions on...

Conventional wisdom treats biodiversity and biotechnology as rivalrous values. The global south is home to most of earth's vanishing species, while the global north holds the capital and technology needed to develop this natural wealth. The south argues that intellectual property laws enable the...

In a pivotal antitrust decision, Cellular South, Inc. v. AT&T Inc., 821 F. Supp. 2d 308 (D.D.C. 2011), the United States District Court for the District of Columbia allowed Sprint and Cellular South to pursue their suits to enjoin AT&T's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. These suits posed a...

The vector of a linear model’s coefficients represents the clearest guide to causal inference. Collinearity among variables, however, undermines the interpretation of that model. A wildly large positive coefficient on one variable may be offset by a comparably large negative coefficient on a...

Economic analysis of technological innovation, diffusion, and decline often proceeds according to sigmoid (S-shaped) models, either directly or as a component in more elaborate mathematical representations of the creative process. Three distinct aspects of American innovation policy —...

Many law schools in the United States condition financial aid grants on the recipients' maintenance of a certain grade point average. These merit stipulations require students to meet or exceed minimum academic standards in order to keep all or part of their financial aid. Law students should...

The conventional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) remains the preferred approach to risk management in a wide range of economic settings. At the same time, the neoclassical assumptions underlying the CAPM have come under severe attack by behavioral economics. In sharp contrast with the purely...

Modern portfolio theory accords symmetrical treatment to all deviations from expected return, positive or negative. This assumption is vulnerable on both descriptive and behavioral grounds. Many of the predictive flaws in contemporary finance stem from mathematically elegant but empirically...

Leptokurtosis, or the risk lurking in “fat tails,” poses the deepest epistemic threat to economic forecasting. Parametric value-at-risk (VaR) models are extremely vulnerable to kurtosis in excess of the levels associated with a normal, Gaussian distribution. This article provides...

What happens when the Supreme Court of the United States decides a case impacting one or more publicly-traded firms? While many have observed anecdotal evidence linking decisions or oral arguments to abnormal stock returns, few have rigorously or systematically investigated the behavior of...