Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Determinants Of Housing Supply Expansion In The Western United States, Nathaniel Tolles

CMC Senior Theses

New residential construction is an important indicator of economic health. Previous empirical work demonstrates the profound power of housing starts in forecasting recession. Theoretical research, backed by empirical study, suggests that home prices and interest rates are closely related to the amount of residential investment. This paper attempts to better understand the complex relationship between various factors that influence the supply and demand of new housing; what information do suppliers and regulators use to determine how many new units of housing will be constructed? Specifically, we will look at the respective state housing markets of California, Oregon, and Washington by …

Team Production Revisited, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article reconsiders Margaret Blair and Lynn Stout’s team production model of corporate law, offering a favorable evaluation. The model explains both the legal corporate entity and corporate governance institutions in microeconomic terms as the means to the end of encouraging investment, situating corporations within markets and subject to market constraints but simultaneously insisting that productive success requires that corporations remain independent of markets. The model also integrates the inherited framework of corporate law into an economically derived model of production, constructing a microeconomic description of large enterprises firmly rooted in corporate doctrine but neither focused on nor limited by …

Corporate Law For Good People, Yuval Feldman, Adi Libson, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

This article offers a novel analysis of the field of corporate governance by viewing it through the lens of behavioral ethics. It calls for both shifting the focus of corporate governance to a new set of loci of potential corporate wrongdoing and adding new tools to the corporate governance arsenal. The behavioral ethics scholarship emphasizes the large share of wrongdoing generated by "good people" whose intention is to act ethically. Their wrongdoing stems from "bounded ethicality" -- various cognitive and motivational processes that lead to biased decisions that seem legitimate. In the legal domain, corporate law provides the most fertile …

Police Quotas, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

The American public is slowly recognizing the criminal justice system’s deep defects. Mounting visual evidence of police brutality and social protests are generating an appetite for something different. How to change this system is still an open question. People across the political spectrum vary in their conceptions of the pressing problems and how to solve them. Interestingly, there is one consequential and overlooked area of the criminal justice system where there is broad consensus: police quotas.

Police quotas are formal and informal measures that require police officers to issue a particular number of citations or make a certain number of …

Rethinking Grid Governance For The Climate Change Era, Shelley Welton

All Faculty Scholarship

The electricity sector is often appropriately called the linchpin of efforts to respond to climate change. Over the next few decades, the U.S. electricity sector will need to double in size to accommodate electric vehicles, at the same time that it transforms to run entirely on clean energy. To drive this transformation, states are increasingly adopting 100% clean energy targets. But fossil fuel corporations are pushing back, seeking to maintain their structural domination of the U.S. energy sector. This article calls attention to one central but under-scrutinized way that these companies impede the clean energy transition: Incumbent fossil fuel companies …

The Bounds Of Energy Law, Shelley Welton

All Faculty Scholarship

U.S. energy law was born of fossil fuels. Consequently, our energy law has long centered on the material and legal puzzles that bringing fossil fuels to market presents. Eliminating these same carbon-producing energy sources, however, has emerged as perhaps the most pressing material transformation needed in the twenty-first century—and one that energy law scholarship has rightfully embraced. Yet in our admirable quest to aid in this transformation, energy law scholars are largely writing into the field bequeathed to us, proposing changes that tweak, but do not fundamentally challenge, last century’s tools for managing the extraction, transport, and delivery of fossil …

The History And Revival Of The Corporate Purpose Clause, Elizabeth Pollman

All Faculty Scholarship

The corporate purpose debate is experiencing a renaissance. The contours of the modern debate are relatively well developed and typically focus on whether corporations should pursue shareholder value maximization or broader social aims. A related subject that has received much less scholarly attention, however, is the formal legal mechanism by which a corporation expresses its purpose—the purpose clause of the corporate charter. This Article examines corporate purpose through the evolution of corporate charters. Starting with historic examples ranging from the Dutch East India Company to early American corporations and their modern 21st century parallels, the discussion illuminates how corporate purpose …

Uncertainty > Risk: Lessons For Legal Thought From The Insurance Runoff Market, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

Insurance ideas inform legal thought: from tort law, to health law and financial services regulation, to theories of distributive justice. Within that thought, insurance is conceived as an ideal type in which insurers distribute determinable risks through contracts that fix the parties’ obligations in advance. This ideal type has normative appeal, among other reasons because it explains how tort law might achieve in practice the objectives of tort theory. This ideal type also supports a restrictive vision of liability-based regulation that opposes expansions and supports cutbacks, on the grounds that uncertainty poses an existential threat to insurance markets.

Prior work …

Indoctrination And Social Influence As A Defense To Crime: Are We Responsible For Who We Are?, Paul H. Robinson, Lindsay Holcomb

All Faculty Scholarship

A patriotic POW is brainwashed by his North Korean captors into refusing repatriation and undertaking treasonous anti-American propaganda for the communist regime. Despite the general abhorrence of treason in time of war, the American public opposes criminal liability for such indoctrinated soldiers, yet existing criminal law provides no defense or mitigation because, at the time of the offense, the indoctrinated offender suffers no cognitive or control dysfunction, no mental or emotional impairment, and no external or internal compulsion. Rather, he was acting purely in the exercise of free of will, albeit based upon beliefs and values that he had not …

Should Corporations Have A Purpose?, Jill E. Fisch, Steven Davidoff Solomon

All Faculty Scholarship

Corporate purpose is the hot topic in corporate governance. Critics are calling for corporations to shift their purpose away from shareholder value as a means of addressing climate change, equity and inclusion, and other social values. We argue that this debate has overlooked the critical predicate questions of whether a corporation should have a purpose at all and, if so, what role it serves.

We start by exploring and rejecting historical, doctrinal, and theoretical bases for corporate purpose. We challenge the premise that purpose can serve a useful function either as a legal constraint on managerial discretion or as a …

A New (Republican) Litigation State?, Stephen B. Burbank, Sean Farhang

All Faculty Scholarship

It is a commonplace in American politics that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to favor access to courts to enforce individual rights with lawsuits. In this article we show that conventional wisdom, long true, no longer reflects party agendas in Congress. We report the results of an empirical examination of bills containing private rights of action with pro-plaintiff fee-shifting provisions that were introduced in Congress from 1989 through 2018. The last eight years of our data document escalating Republican-party support for proposals to create individual rights enforceable by private lawsuits, mobilized with attorney’s fee awards. By 2015-18, there …

Synthetic Governance, Byung Hyun Anh, Jill E. Fisch, Panos N. Patatoukas, Steven Davidoff Solomon

All Faculty Scholarship

Although securities regulation is distinct from corporate governance, the two fields have considerable substantive overlap. By increasing the transparency and efficiency of the capital markets, securities regulation can also enhance the capacity of those markets to discipline governance decisions. The importance of market discipline is heightened by the increasingly vocal debate over what constitutes “good” corporate governance.

Securities product innovation offers new tools to address this debate. The rise of index-based investing provides a market-based mechanism for selecting among governance options and evaluating their effects. Through the creation of bespoke governance index funds, asset managers can create indexes that correspond …

Propertizing Fair Use, Abraham Bell, Gideon Parchomovsky

All Faculty Scholarship

In its current form, fair use doctrine provides a personal defense that applies narrowly to the specific use by the specific user. The landmark case of Google v. Oracle, currently pending before the Supreme Court, illustrates why this is problematic. Even if the Court were to rule that Google’s use of Oracle’s Java API’s was fair, the ruling would not protect the numerous parties that developed Java applications for the Android operating system; it would only shelter Google and Google’s particular use. This is not an isolated problem; the per use/per user rule cuts across fair uses of copyrighted …

Compensation, Commodification, And Disablement: How Law Has Dehumanized Laboring Bodies And Excluded Nonlaboring Humans, Karen M. Tani

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews Nate Holdren's Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the changes in legal imagination that accompanied the rise of workers' compensation programs. The essay foregrounds Holdren’s insights about disability. Injury Impoverished illustrates the meaning and material consequences that the law has given to work-related impairments over time and documents the naturalization of disability-based exclusion from the formal labor market. In the present day, with so many social benefits tied to employment, this exclusion is particularly troubling.

Prosecuting Civil Asset Forfeiture On Contingency Fees: Looking For Profit In All The Wrong Places, Louis S. Rulli

All Faculty Scholarship

Civil asset forfeiture has strayed far from its intended purpose. Designed to give law enforcement powerful tools to combat maritime offenses and criminal enterprises, forfeiture laws are now used to prey upon innocent motorists and lawful homeowners who are never charged with crimes. Their only sins are that they are carrying legal tender while driving on busy highways or providing shelter in their homes to adult children and grandchildren who allegedly sold small amounts of low-level drugs. Civil forfeiture abuses are commonplace throughout the country with some police even armed with legal waivers for property owners to sign on the …

The State And Cannabis : What Is Success? A Comparative Analysis Of Cannabis Policy In The United States Of America, Uruguay, And Canada, Gideon C. Cunningham

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Globally, the policies that states engage in concerning the cultivation, production, distribution, and sale of recreational cannabis in the 21st century is changing rapidly. Three countries have now legalized, regulated, and implemented recreational cannabis frameworks, albeit in starkly different ways. These countries are The United States of America, Uruguay, and Canada. This research identifies the contradictory nature of cannabis policy goals and compares the similarities and differences of each countries’ recreational cannabis framework. It proposes a theory of understanding the contradictory nature of creating cannabis policies post-legalization and presents a framework from which to analyze the success of individual cannabis …

A Model Of Regime Change: The Impact Of Arab Spring Throughout The Middle East And North Africa, Omar Khalfan Bizuru

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This study examined the catalysts for social movements around the globe; specifically, why and how the Arab Spring uprisings led to regime change in Tunisia, why they transformed into civil war in some countries of the Middle East and North Africa (Syria), and why they did not lead to significant change at all in other places (Bahrain). The overall results of the study confirmed that political and socio-economic grievances caused the Arab uprisings in Tunisia, Bahrain, and Syria. Tunisian protesters succeeded in regime change because of a united and structured social movement leading to an effective transitional democracy in the …

The Effect Of Careless Responding Warnings On Construct Validity, Mark A. Roebke

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Careless responding is a problem for survey research that poses threats to both the reliability and validity of data collected. Warnings against careless responding have been proposed as a potential solution to reduce this harmful effect. The present study examines how warnings can reduce careless responding as well as examine how those warnings may influence the reliability and validity of data collected. Data was collected in a low stakes online testing format in a way similar to many psychological studies. This study included informant dyad data from people who knew the participants well to provide external criteria for analysis. A …

Promises And Pitfalls Of Machine Learning Classifiers For Inter-Rater Reliability Annotation, Lucille Dorothy Ayres

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Qualitative data result from observation, video, and dialogue. These types of data are flexible and allow us to study behavior without imposing potentially disruptive data collection methods. However, subsequent quantitative analysis requires a time consuming, labor intensive initial coding process, and a second manual coding to calculate inter-rater reliability. I examined the use of machine learning algorithms to reduce the amount of manual annotation work required to perform inter-rater reliability measures on text data. By comparing machine-human and human-human raters using Cohen’s Kappa statistic and an informal analysis of the features used in machine learning classification, I identify the promise …

Capturing Intentional Testing Of An Automated System, Abraham Haskins

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Users change their behavior when interacting with automated systems based upon their trust levels. Users faced with an unknown system will adjust their trust levels as they learn more about that system. Past automation trust research has implicitly assumed that users are passive recipients of information when interacting with new systems. Feedback-seeking behavior, a pattern of behavior involving actively eliciting information about one’s performance, is a well-researched concept within interpersonal research. Applying this interpersonal research to the domain of automation, I examined cases in which individuals sought feedback regarding the reliability of an unfamiliar automated system by asking for answers …

An Interaction Between Anthropomorphism And Personality On Trust In Automated Systems, Abraham Haskins

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Automated assistance is increasingly being implemented in domains ranging from healthcare to transportation. The reason for the tendency for certain users to trust or mistrust automated assistance has been studied to mixed effect. I examined the effect of anthropomorphism as an independent factor on user trust. In addition, I examined the potential for anthropomorphism to act as a moderator between the personality traits of a user and the trust a user demonstrates in the automated aid. Though the participants in the anthropomorphic condition did view the assistant as more human-like, the level of anthropomorphism had no effect on user behavior. …

Role Overload: Examining The Definition And Measurement Of A Common Work Stressor, Sean Becker

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Researchers previously gave considerable attention to role overload as a predictor of employee health, job attitudes, and behavior. However, the validity and conceptualization of role overload measures have been questioned and show inconsistent results. In response to the issues with role overload measures, the researcher developed a new measure of total role overload, consisting of two work related dimensions, qualitative and quantitative. These dimensions were crossed with “data people and things” to provide diagnostic ability and one non-work-related dimension of family role overload to contextualize the individual’s life. The researcher conducted three studies to examine the psychometric qualities of the …

Percepción Frente A La Construcción De La Primera Línea Metro De Bogotá De Los Habitantes Y Comerciantes Ubicados En La Zona De Influencia Del Proyecto., David Stiven Morales Romero

Ingeniería Civil

La primera línea del metro de Bogotá es un sueño cumplido para los millones de Bogotanos, pues lo estaban esperando hace más de 60 años; sin embargo, un gran proyecto como este requiere grandes afectaciones a nivel social, económico, ambiental, político entre otros, es por esta razón que dentro de la investigación se partió de la pregunta “¿Cuál es la Percepción Frente a la Construcción de la Primera Línea Metro de Bogotá de los Habitantes y Comerciantes Ubicados en la Zona de Influencia del Proyecto?”, a partir del interrogante se revisó información internacional en países como Panamá, lima y Quito …

Exploring The Relationship Of Gender, Covid-19-Related Stress And Autobiographical Memory, Mirelle Kass

Behavioral Neuroscience Honors Papers

The Coronavirus (COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2) pandemic erupted in March 2020 and significantly disrupted the daily lives of all individuals. The limited number of COVID-19 research studies have focused on psychological distress in general adult populations or in essential workers, but its effects on Autobiographical Memory (AM), the collection of personal memories that aid in the formation of one’s goals and identities, have not yet been explored. The current study contributes important discoveries to the growing body of literature through its exploration of the intersection of COVID-19-related stress, AM performance, and sex assigned at birth in undergraduate college students. Results suggest that …

Balancing The Pedagogical And Practical Concerns In Remote Higher Education: A Cyberethnography, Jose Eos R. Trinidad, Samantha Joan Ackary, Lyka Janelle P. Pacleb, Sophia Sue Tabanao, Jan Llenzl Dagohoy

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about physical school closures and quick transitions online, with universities making decisions for this new mode of instruction. Such decisions, however, were open to discussion and debates, particularly as students and instructors held varying concerns, experiences, and expectations for remote learning. We investigate what these debates are using a cyberethnography of a Facebook group for students and faculty, and an anonymous Freedom Wall page for students in the same university. The concerns centered on workload that balanced academic rigor and practical exigencies; learning modalities that balanced accountability and flexibility; and assessments that balanced academic integrity and …

Strategic Implications Of Covid-19: Considerations For Georgia’S Rural Health Providers, Bettye A. Apenteng, Linda Kimsey, Charles Owens, Samuel T. Opoku, Angela Peden, William Mase

Department of Health Policy and Community Health Faculty Publications

Whether rural hospitals and providers have seen a surge in COVID-19 cases or a reduction in patients seeking care since the pandemic began, their financial condition has been negatively impacted. Many providers have now received some emergency funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act and the Payroll Protection Program but these are likely only short-term fixes. For many, the crisis has exacerbated already existing problems. Notable among these problems are volume declines, supply chain disruptions, and workforce concerns. While these problems require immediate action, two longer-term systemic changes to rural healthcare delivery are needed to address them. …

Invisible Chronic Illness In College: Faculty Perspectives And Student Narratives Surrounding Accommodations, Andra Gurley-Green

Psychology Honors Papers

The objectives of this study were to explore faculty perceptions of accommodations for students with Invisible Chronic Illness (ICI), understand what may influence accommodation perceptions in the case of Chronic Migraine, and gain insight into the experiences of students with ICI. Faculty and students at Connecticut College responded to a hypothetical accommodation letter for a student with Chronic Migraine that varied as follows: standard letter (no illness information), diagnosis, illness education from accessibility office, illness education from student. All participants responded to questions about four approved accommodations (distraction-free testing, extended test time, deadline flexibility, attendance flexibility) asking how “most faculty” …

The Rise In Use Of Emotional Support Animals By College Students: The Impact Of Parenting Styles, Misty G. Smith, Samantha Ballard, Jill Willis

Georgia Journal of College Student Affairs

As the generational context of higher education shifts, a rise of Emotional Support Animals (ESA) and mental health concerns are present for students on college campuses. While previous studies have aimed to address the relevancy and controversy of ESAs in higher education as well as their effectiveness in supporting individuals, less research has explored underlying factors that contribute to the use of an ESA. The purpose of this study was to explore the parenting behaviors of parents/caregivers of students with ESAs in comparison to parents/caregivers of students without ESAs. An embedded mixed methods design was used. Participants completed the Parenting …

Debtor Spaces: Austerity, Space, And Dispossession In Michigan’S Emergency Management System, Melissa Heil

Faculty Publications-- Geography, Geology, and the Environment

In recent years, debt has become a major focus of geographic research as debt relations have become increasingly central to today’s financialized capitalist economy. This paper bridges two aspects of the debt literature: (1) the emergent literature on debt spatiality, which argues that space plays an active role in the creation and maintenance of debt relations, and (2) the broader literature examining processes of debt-driven dispossession (e.g., foreclosure, eviction, austerity, etc.). Recent literature in geography, led by Harker’s work on debt spaces, has argued that debt should not only be understood as a temporal relation (a promise of future labor) …

Twelve Angry Men: A Twenty-First Century Reflection Of Race, Art, And Incarceration, Mackenzie A. Gross

Honors Theses

Twelve Angry Men: A Twenty-First Century Reflection of Race, Art and Incarceration is a Comparative and Digital Humanities Honors Thesis concentrating on Africana Studies, theatre, sociology and legal studies to demonstrate the importance of investing in incarcerated communities through theatre and education.

In Chapter I, I critique the loss of identity attached to incarceration, and introduce the foundation for Black bodies individuals being discriminated against in the prosecution system. I analyze the “Punishment vs Progress” mentality, and introduce current educational programs in place in prisons. I elaborate on the details of our production, as well as the makeup of actors. …