The Coming Showdown Over University Endowments: Enlisting the Donors

This Essay focuses on the discordance between universities with particularly large endowments and what is occurring in the rest of higher education, particularly with respect to skyrocketing tuition and a growing institutional wealth gap. The Essay considers absolute endowment values, the amount of endowment per student, and expense-endowment ratios at sixty private universities. It concludes that a small number of schools have an excess endowment, and then provides a convenient proxy for determining when an endowment is so large that it should receive less preferential tax treatment. The Essay then considers the effects that large endowments have at their home institutions and throughout higher education, the arguments in defense of large endowments, and some frequently proposed modifications to the tax code. The Essay recommends that policymakers modify the charitable deduction for gifts to universities with mega-endowments, as part of a multifaceted effort to spur endowment spending and control tuition

Rethinking the Intersection of Inheritance and the Law of Tenancy in Common

The article discusses the rules of tenancy and standard doctrine in relation to identity property. It explains the result for property law and suggests reforms that would decrease conflict among heirs to identity property to successfully own and manage the property. It states that co-tenants receive a proportional share of rents and profits earned and should pay taxes and mortgages. It informs that steps could be taken to encourage the interest of co-tenants

Rethinking the Intersection of Inheritance and the Law of Tenancy in Common

The article discusses the rules of tenancy and standard doctrine in relation to identity property. It explains the result for property law and suggests reforms that would decrease conflict among heirs to identity property to successfully own and manage the property. It states that co-tenants receive a proportional share of rents and profits earned and should pay taxes and mortgages. It informs that steps could be taken to encourage the interest of co-tenants

Cash, Credit or Cell Phone? How to Influence Public Preferences about Payment Systems

The paper examines how the government can influence the public’s choice of a particular payment system: not only existing systems like credit and debit cards, but innovative products such as stored value cards, electronic checks and electronic money. The success or failure of a new payment system can have a large economic impact, with shifts toward electronic payment options in particular having the potential to save up to one percent of a nation’s gross domestic product. For the United States, that translates to approximately one hundred billion dollars worth of savings. Whether a new payment system succeeds or fails depends upon social acceptance; that is, consumers and merchants have to simultaneously embrace the new payment option. Government action, both direct and indirect, can strongly influence consumer and merchant behavior. Whether and how the government affects payment preferences depends on whether the government is acting as fiduciary, seller, or law-maker; its precise goal; and the particular sort of payment system at issue. Depending on the situation, the government may (1) provide information that allows individuals to coordinate behavior, (2) pass legislation or adopt policies aimed at reducing concerns about a particular system, (3) provide incentives to induce individuals to adopt new payment systems, or (4) force change by eliminating or curtailing the older payment form. The paper suggests that in the realm of payments, governmental efforts to influence behavior will be most successful if they force change, not if they gently influence public preferences. This conclusion runs counter to the common wisdom in the social norms literature that law most effectively influences behavior when it promotes incremental advancement, not wholesale change. Because payment methods are poised to continue the massive evolution that has occurred over the past twenty-five years, advocates of new systems are increasingly likely to attempt to involve government in promoting their fledging payment mechanisms. The paper suggests that government intervention, although often successful, is usually unwise for at least three reasons. First, technology moves quickly and the government usually moves slowly. Second, with a bit of time, new payment systems that are sufficiently advantageous to the public are likely to flourish without governmental intervention. Third and finally, governmental intervention may have the unintended consequence of undermining the incentive to invest in new payment technologies in the first instance

The New Tipping Point: Disruptive Politics and Habituating Equality

This Essay argues that the events of 2020 opened a window of political opportunity to implement policies aimed at dismantling structural injustice and systemic racism. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Mills and political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward, we argue that the Black Lives Matter Movement constituted the “disruptive politics” necessary to shift dispositions of many in the United States toward racial equity by interrupting the white “epistemologies of ignorance.” Moreover, because policies that correct structural injustice are beneficial for people across race, even those whose hearts and minds remained closed may embrace legislative policies that function to dismantle systemic racism. As people become habituated to structures that facilitate equality and the policies that underlie them, the United States will finally begin to tip toward equality and a society of belonging

Abstracts from the 8th International Conference on cGMP Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications

This work was supported by a restricted research grant of Bayer AG

A Norms-Based Approach to Sustaining Integration

Headlines about racial polarization and a country divided obscure an important present opportunity: racial integration initiated by local community choice. These local contexts have national significance in light of census data showing that American suburbs and exurbs are perfectly positioned to integrate and can do so through local choice irrespective of what occurs at the federal level. However, integration is not preordained. Census data shows segregation decreasing within some large cities but increasing in metropolitan areas as a whole. When Blacks move to the suburbs, Whites flee to locations ever farther from the city’s center. Suburbs and exurbs, not cities, are the new ground zero for integration efforts. The stakes are high: Ferguson, Missouri, home of the 2014 protests, is a suburb from which sixty-two percent of the White population fled between 1990 and 2010. Using empirical fieldwork from a Chicago suburb that successfully integrated in the 1970’s, this Article sheds light on how norms and other behavioral phenomena fuel the dynamics of integration. When a community deliberately chooses to integrate, it generates norms that foster and sustain integration. As a norm weaves itself into the fabric of the community, it becomes even more powerful than law. The norm helps ensure that individuals within the community make integration-affirming choices, even when those choices are costly. When the norm is visible to those outside the community, it attracts new members who value integration and are likely to support the policies that foster it. Once suburbs and exurbs opt for integration instead of White flight, norms and other mainstays of behavioral law and economics allow integration to perpetuate

Government Intervention in Emerging Networked Technologies

52 p.We begin in Part I by describing and modeling how merchants and consumers decide whether to adopt and use a particular payment technology and then introduce the complications of network effects and multi-sided platforms. In Part II, we describe the various roles that the government may assume vis-à-vis any new technology, namely, legislator, fiduciary, or seller. Part III then discusses the tools that the government has available to influence public preferences. Part IV argues that despite the availability of these tools, the government generally should not act to promote particular technologies

The Coming Showdown Over University Endowments: Enlisting the Donors

This Essay focuses on the discordance between universities with particularly large endowments and what is occurring in the rest of higher education, particularly with respect to skyrocketing tuition and a growing institutional wealth gap. The Essay considers absolute endowment values, the amount of endowment per student, and expense-endowment ratios at sixty private universities. It concludes that a small number of schools have an excess endowment, and then provides a convenient proxy for determining when an endowment is so large that it should receive less preferential tax treatment. The Essay then considers the effects that large endowments have at their home institutions and throughout higher education, the arguments in defense of large endowments, and some frequently proposed modifications to the tax code. The Essay recommends that policymakers modify the charitable deduction for gifts to universities with mega-endowments, as part of a multifaceted effort to spur endowment spending and control tuition

Rethinking the Intersection of Inheritance and the Law of Tenancy in Common

The article discusses the rules of tenancy and standard doctrine in relation to identity property. It explains the result for property law and suggests reforms that would decrease conflict among heirs to identity property to successfully own and manage the property. It states that co-tenants receive a proportional share of rents and profits earned and should pay taxes and mortgages. It informs that steps could be taken to encourage the interest of co-tenants