Income, Value and Returns in Socially Responsible Office Properties

This paper compares alternative methods for taking spatial dependence into account in house price prediction. We select hedonic methods that have been reported in the literature to perform relatively well in terms of ex-sample prediction accuracy. Because differences in performance may be due to differences in data, we compare the methods using a single data set. The estimation methods include simple OLS, a two-stage process incorporating nearest neighbors’ residuals in the second stage, geostatistical, and trend surface models. These models take into account submarkets by adding dummy variables or by estimating separate equations for each submarket. Based on data for approximately 13,000 transactions from Louisville, Kentucky, we conclude that a geostatistical model with disaggregated submarket variables performs best.

Idiosyncratic risk and aggregate employment dynamics

This paper studies how producers’ idiosyncratic risks affect an industry’s aggregate dynamics in an environment where certainty equivalence fails. In the model, producers can place workers in two types of jobs, organized and temporary. Workers are less productive in temporary jobs, but creating an organized job requires an irreversible investment of managerial resources. Increasing productivity risk raises the value of an unexercised option to create an organized job. Losing this option is one cost of immediate organized job creation, so an increase in its value induces substitution towards cheaper temporary jobs. Because they are costless to create and destroy, a producer using temporary jobs can be more flexible, responding more to both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. If all of an industry’s producers adapt to heightened idiosyncratic risk in this way, the industry as a whole can respond more to a given aggregate shock. This insight is used to better understand the observation from the U.S. manufacturing sector that groups of plants displaying high idiosyncratic variability also have large aggregate fluctuations.Employment (Economic theory) ; Temporary employees

Understanding aggregate job flows

The authors describe how evidence on aggregate job flows challenges standard business cycle theory and discuss recent developments in business cycle theory aimed at accounting for the evidence.Business cycles ; Employment (Economic theory) ; Labor market

Aggregate Employment Fluctuations with Microeconomic Asymmetries

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation: job creation is costlier at the margin than job destruction. As Caballero [2] has argued, asymmetric employment adjustment costs at the establishment level need not imply asymmetric volatility of aggregate job flows. We construct an equilibrium model in which (S,s)-type employment policies respond endogenously to aggregate shocks. The microeconomic asymmetries in the model can dampen the response of total job creation to an aggregate shock and cause it to be less volatile than total job destruction. This is so even though aggregate shocks are symmetrically distributed.

When Discretion Leads to Distortion: Recognizing Pre-Arrest Sentence-Manipulation Claims Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

This Note argues that sentence manipulation should be a legally viable partial defense - a defense that does not warrant complete exoneration, but does warrant a reduced sentence when the government\u27s investigative techniques place a quantity of drugs before the court that overrepresents the defendant\u27s culpability, or individual blameworthiness. Part I describes the policies and objectives that underlie the Guidelines, but then demonstrates how the rigid application of quantity-based sentencing provisions can lead to sentence manipulation that thwarts these goals, particularly the goal of sentencing according to culpability. Part II describes how courts have responded to sentence manipulation claims. It contends that the majority of the courts\u27 position - examining police practices under the due process outrageous government conduct test - is misplaced and inadequate, while the minority\u27s position of departing downward for less than constitutional violations is more appropriate and promising. Part ill proposes alternative legal formulas for recognizing sentence manipulation as a viable and effective partial defense: allowing it as a special circumstance that warrants a downward departure under the Guidelines or amending the Guidelines themselves to limit the number of transactions that may constitute relevant conduct

\u3cem\u3eCrawford v. Washington\u3c/em\u3e: The Next Ten Years

Imagine a world . . . in which the Supreme Court got it right the first time. That is, imagine that when the Supreme Court first incorporated the Confrontation Clause against the states, the Court did so by way of the testimonial approach. It’s not that hard to envision. In Douglas v. Alabama—issued in 1965, on the same day the Court ruled that the Confrontation Clause applies to the states—the Court held that a nontestifying witness’s custodial confession could not be introduced against the defendant because, while “not technically testimony,” the confession was “the equivalent in the jury’s mind of testimony” from the nontestifying witness. From that platform, all the Court would have needed to say in Dutton v. Evans and Ohio v. Roberts was that a statement made seemingly in confidence to a cellmate is not “testimonial” in nature, while statements at a preliminary hearing obviously are (although such statements still are admissible when the defendant had an adequate prior opportunity for cross-examination). Of course, things did not turn out that way. Concerned about the unusual nature of Georgia’s version of the coconspirator hearsay exception at issue in Dutton, the Court tied itself up in knots. Then it announced in Roberts that the Confrontation Clause essentially tracked hearsay law

The Unwelcome Judicial Obligation to Respect Politics in Racial Gerrymandering Remedies

Like it or not, the attack on bizarrely shaped majority-minority electoral districts is now firmly underway. Nearly four years have passed since the Supreme Court first announced in Shaw v. Reno that a state\u27s redistricting plan that is so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting may violate the Equal Protection Clause. Such a district, the Court held, reinforces racial stereotypes, carries us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters, and threatens to undermine our system of representative democracy by signaling to elected officials that they represent a particular racial group rather than their constituency as a whole. The Court shows no signs of reconsidering this stance. Yet Shaw\u27s constitutional harm is still often misunderstood. Shaw claims are not reverse discrimination claims. In fact, the Shaw Court took pains to emphasize that the harm caused by racially gerrymandered districts was analytically distinct from the previously recognized harms of vote dilution and malapportioned districts. Even when a Shaw violation occurs, each citizen\u27s vote is still worth the same amount as every other citizen\u27s; white voters do not suffer because the district unfairly prevents them from electing the representative of their choice. In other words, plaintiffs in Shaw claims do not suffer any cognizable harm tied to election results, but rather feel only the expressive injury of being subjected to a racial classification in and of itself