Social Science Research Network Research Articles

To the Students in MIT 10-250, and All Other Students of Engineering and Science: Why Atlas Shrugged Is a Book You Should Read

To the Students in MIT 10-250, and All Other Students of Engineering and Science: Why Atlas Shrugged Is a Book You Should Read

The Value of Legal Writing, Law Review, and Publication

While highly developed communication skills contribute substantially to success in other professions and in our personal relationships, legal research and writing is likely the foundation for a successful career in the law. Law review articles are cited by judges in their opinions, and by Congress and regulatory authorities in the making of law, regulations, and policy. Any great legal orator, litigator, or Supreme Court Justice will need the benefit of quickly recognizing legally significant fact patterns, the ability to conduct research regarding statutory and case law, and the ability to make compelling, cogent legal arguments. The experience gained from legal research and writing sharpens all these tools. I’m hopeful this article may become required reading as one of the first assignments for all incoming 1Ls, or even before any classes begin. Presented first, is a brief examination of why lawyers don’t write well. Next, is a description of the law review: its value; a brief history of the American law journal experience; the editor selection process; who does what at law reviews; and the number and type of law journals. Thoughts about the writing process and important considerations regarding law review writing in particular are then presented. Reflections by recent law journal editors about their law review experience are offered next, along with suggestions about how authors may improve their manuscripts. Then, the who, what, where, and when of the publication process is covered. Comments about the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) are followed by a brief discussion about the currency value of citations. I believe this article starts a fresh conversation about the importance and value of legal writing, law review, and law journal publication.

Facilitators and inhibitors of transition for older people who have relocated to a long‐term care facility: A systematic review

Moving into a long-term care facility to live permanently is a significant life event for older people. Care facilities need to support older people to make a healthy transition following relocation. To help achieve this, we need to understand what facilitates and inhibits the transition process from the perspective of older people, their families, and care facility staff. Our review generated new knowledge to inform this understanding. We addressed the question: what factors facilitate and inhibit transition for older people who have relocated to a long-term care facility? Five electronic databases, PsychINFO, British Nursing Index, CINAHL, MEDLINE and Web of Science were searched for the period January 1990 to October 2017. Grey literature searches were conducted using Google Scholar, and Social Science Research Network. Data were extracted for individual studies and a narrative synthesis was conducted informed by Meleis's Theory of Transition. Thirty-four studies (25 qualitative, 7 quantitative and 2 mixed methods) met the inclusion criteria. Data synthesis identified that transition following relocation was examined using a variety of terms, timelines and study designs. Potential personal and community focused facilitators and inhibitors mapped to four themes: resilience of the older person, interpersonal connections and relationships, this is my new home, and the care facility as an organisation. These findings can inform the development of interventions for these target areas. They highlight also that further research is warranted to understand the organisational culture of long-term care facilities, how this influences transition, and how it might be shaped to create and sustain a caring culture for older people.

Mind Over Matter: Presentation to the New Zealand Ministerial Enquiry into Mental Health

Mental health is arguably the most important determinant of living a fulfilling life. Within any society, a government committed to serving the citizens and enhancing their life experience, then mental health policy is arguably one of the two most important policies it manages, the second being economic policy enhancing the wealth and financial security of citizens, itself a major driver of citizen mental health. In books and papers at my Social Science Research Network author site, https://ssrn.com/author=2572745, I argue that the economy of a nation dedicated to individual freedom must serve people, not the other way around as it does now. It is crucial that mental health policy is not judged in isolation, but within the context of the society, and its existing primary ideologies. The social context I refer to as the social milieu. The demand for mental health services is accelerating throughout the free world. The need for effective mental health support of citizens is given weight by the suicide statistics in New Zealand for example, with 11 people committing suicide per 100,000 citizens. NZ is an example of the free world, but the problem is endemic across the world. In China for example, the suicide rate is over 20 per 100,000 citizens. The question is ‘why?’ and what can be done about it? How can government via mental health policy enable greater citizen life fulfillment? This paper argues that the correct science of people is dualism, not monism. That is, the mind is separate from the brain, and it is the mind that is the primary causal factor in creation of human psychic states. It follows that management of psychic states involves management of mind, not of the brain. This change in the applied science, from monism to dualism, changes all aspects of mental health policy and practice, and without this change, policy on mental health will remain confused and ineffective with constantly rising demand for increased expenditure. The paper presents a new social science within which all human characteristics and outputs are accounted for. When applied to society, the science provides the foundation of a complete social ideology enabling a future society better than our current society.

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Chapter 8 – Media reporting of migrants and migration

Promises, Conditions and Rules of the Game for Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/Phenomenological Modell

This document includes the eighth of nine pre-classroom reading for our leadership course (“Being A Leader and The Effective Exercise Of Leadership: An Ontological / Phenomenological Model”). The intention of this one semester leadership course is to leave participants actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression. By “natural self-expression” we mean a way of being and acting in any leadership situation that is a spontaneous and intuitive effective response to what one is dealing with. The course is based on a new science of leadership. In addition to being designed to actually create leaders, this new science of leadership enables faculty in higher education to access, study, research, and teach being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as these are actually lived and experienced. History of the Course: The course was first developed by the authors at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, NY, USA, from 2004 to 2008, working each year with 70 to 115 undergraduates, graduate students, administrators, alumni, business executives and consultants, and faculty from various academic institutions. The course has been taught in the curriculum at the US Air Force Academy since 2008; at Erasmus Academie Rotterdam, Netherlands, in June 2009 (a version of which was also taught at the Erasmus University Law School in 2009 and 2010); at Texas AM in India under the auspices of the IC Centre for Governance and MW Corporation in November 2010; at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, USA, in June 2012; at University of British Columbia’s entrepreneurship@UBC, Canada, in June 2013; at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in July 2014; held at the Zayed University Convention Center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in January 2015; and at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, USA, in June 2016; in Abu Dhabi, UAE in October 2016 and at University of California, Los Angeles, USA in July 2018.. Courses offered for the benefit of the Erhard-Jensen Ontological / Phenomenological Initiative include: Whistler, B.C. Canada, in October 2012; Bermuda in November 2014; Cancun, Mexico, in October 2013 and December 2015, Abu Dhabi, UAE in October 2016; in Cancun, Mexico in October 2017 and in Cancun, Mexico in October 2018. The promise of the course is to leave participants actually being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self expression, and for the course to contribute to creating a new science of leadership. Our desire is to make the course available to faculty in accredited colleges and universities to teach it, to communicate it and to extend it. This material is not fully complete nor is it polished to our standards. We are releasing the material so that we can benefit from the comments, criticisms and suggestions of others in higher education who share our desire to accelerate the development of a true science of leadership. We want to see this material (or material derived from it) taught in every major accredited college and university. While the course is still a work in progress, we, the authors and instructors, are making all the materials available through SSRN (Social Science Research Network) to those faculty members who wish to teach versions of the course in a university or college setting.

Can Microsoft Academic be used for citation analysis of preprint archives? The case of the Social Science Research Network

Preprint archives play an important scholarly communication role within some fields. The impact of archives and individual preprints are difficult to analyse because online repositories are not indexed by the Web of Science or Scopus. In response, this article assesses whether the new Microsoft Academic can be used for citation analysis of preprint archives, focusing on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Although Microsoft Academic seems to index SSRN comprehensively, it groups a small fraction of SSRN papers into an easily retrievable set that has variations in character over time, making any field normalisation or citation comparisons untrustworthy. A brief parallel analysis of arXiv suggests that similar results would occur for other online repositories. Systematic analyses of preprint archives are nevertheless possible with Microsoft Academic when complete lists of archive publications are available from other sources because of its promising coverage and citation results.

The quality of life of older people aging in place: a literature review.

In order to cope with the challenges that are the result of an aging population, policies and services promote keeping elders in the community and letting them age in place rather than sending them to specialized institutions. Aging in place refers to the option where people can stay in their homes as they age. This policy option, however, poses various challenges and may also threaten the quality of life of the aging. A literature review was performed on the quality of life of older people aging in place to determine whether the actual assessment of quality of life can be used within aging in place. Web of Science, PubMed, CINAHL, Sociological Abstracts and Social Science Research Network were searched for publications on "Ag(e)ing in place" AND "Quality of life." Although assessment is crucial to a policy pursuing a good quality of life, literature reveals that it is seldom performed. Only a small part of the studies report on the assessment of quality of life, including the instruments used and the results. The findings also indicate that there is no consensus on the definition of quality of life or its domains structures. As no existing instrument assessing the quality of life of older people aging in place could be identified, such a tool should be developed, because any policy towards this growing group of people should be complemented by an evaluation.

Elsevier Buys SSRN.com: What It Means for Scholarly Publication

An open source alternative in law, economics and the social sciences has been the Social Science Research Network, or SSRN (www.ssrn.com). SSRN, a for-profit company, provides a venue for scholars to publish pre-print and other editions of their scholarly works for free, and allows users to similarly access their content for free. (Disclosure: I am an SSRN “author.” My content can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=338251.) SSRN has more than 2 million registered members with over 670,000 paper abstracts from over 300,000 authors. SSRN earns revenue by selling subscriptions to pre-packaged journals containing current and back-issued articles on different topics or themes. Within law and many other disciplines, it has become a favorite venue for pre-print publication and its download and citation counts are often used as a measure of the value of the scholarship–and at least to some tenure and promotion committees–of the scholar. In what some are describing as a shocking, but not necessarily unexpected move, in May 2016 Elsevier, the multi-national publishing conglomerate based in the Netherlands, purchased SSRN for an undisclosed price. Compared to recent mergers and consolidations in the publishing industry the scale of the transaction is comparatively small, but the impact could be considerable.

The Taskforce on Conceptual Foundations of Earth System Governance: Sustainability Science

We are pleased to introduce the second special issue from Challenges in Sustainability, this time as a part of the Taskforce on Conceptual Foundations of Earth System Governance, an initiative by the Earth System Governance Project (ESG) ( http://www.earthsystemgovernance.net/conceptual-foundations/ ). The ESG Project is a global research alliance. It is the largest social science research network in the field of governance and global environmental change. ESG is primarily a scientific effort but is also designed to assist policy responses to pressing problems of earth system transformation.

ADVISING THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES ON ECONOMIC POLICY

Editors’ note: This essay recalls some of the ways in which government policymakers come to agreement on how to solve economic problems and formulate economic policy proposals for submission to the President of the United States. These posthumously edited reflections were excerpted from Paul MacAvoy's unpublished manuscript, Day to Day at the CEA: Letters, Memoranda, and Notes on Economic Policy to the World at Large from a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Ford Administration (1975–1976), available in its entirety on the Social Science Research Network. The editors have reordered some paragraphs to facilitate the essay's flow, taking into consideration that the reader is not seeing the nearly 300 pages of original source documents within which Professor MacAvoy interspersed the commentary published here. The editors have also given the essay a title and section captions.

Social-sciences preprint server snapped up by publishing giant Elsevier

The Social Science Research Network says that it will continue to offer free submissions and downloads under its new owner.

The Business Subsidy Industry In Ohio

This paper critically examines Ohio Governor Kasich’s signature economic development program, the JobsOhio corporation, in light of the intellectual foundations for constitutional government and a market economy. In 2011, at Gov. Kasich’s behest, the Ohio General Assembly created the JobsOhio corporation. JobsOhio is, in essence, a quasi-private entity with a public fund that it uses to provide government subsidies for business. In some ways JobsOhio is an Enron scheme for government; “off-balance sheet” diversion of public funds to private businesses. JobsOhio operates outside the purview of public records laws, open meetings laws, ethics laws, and, after a 2014 Ohio Supreme Court decision, without regard for constitutional fiscal constraint under the Ohio Constitution. Governor Kasich promotes the non-transparent JobsOhio corporation as necessary to attract and create jobs with a development agency that “moves at the speed of business.” But the joinder of the public and private spheres is cause for concern. The character of government is at stake when the sphere of politicizable activity is unlimited and government may invest in private enterprise without limitation. Politicians promoting government subsidies for business may be rewarded with campaign contributions or worse, bribes. Businesses too may look at their bottom line and find it more profitable to invest in socially wasteful political conflict rather than the research and development that fosters economic growth and drives the economy. By chronicling the history of the Ohio Constitution, this paper provides context for Nobel Laureate in Economics James Buchanan’s “constitutional generality principle,” as an institutional safeguard to promote stability in government and foster innovation. The 1851 Ohio Constitution contains a package of at least a dozen constitutional constraints that are designed to promote generality, or fairness, in government; a balanced budget provision, debt limits, appropriation limits, constraints on public-private partnerships, and others. Ohioans adopted these provisions after a broadly reaching administrative state in 19th Century became wildly corrupt while constructing the Ohio Canal System. Not unlike JobsOhio, 19th Century legislators simply delegated decisions regarding public investment in private enterprise to administrative agencies as political cronyism grew out of hand. This paper details the ideas, persons, and events that shaped the deterioration of the package of constitutional fiscal constraints in the 1851 Ohio Constitution. The story is still unfolding on Gov. Kasich’s watch. In 2014, after a series of JobsOhio-related scandals including “sham” litigation, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that challengers to the JobsOhio subsidy program did not have “standing” to argue that JobsOhio violates the Ohio Constitution. The Court did not identify anyone who did have standing though. Further, the Court so held despite provisions in the Ohio Constitution that forbid the lending of aid or credit from governmental entities to private businesses. Ironically, JobsOhio itself is now in charge of the constitutional revision process, as a State-created commission created to study the Ohio Constitution has a finance and taxation committee headed up by JobsOhio’s outside legal counsel. Today, the deterioration of the Ohio Constitution has given rise to a widely reaching “business subsidy industry” of, well, just about everyone: politicians, interest groups, the media, lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, bureaucrats, private industry, and, yes, voters. The situation provides context to present the roles of the players in the business subsidy industry, and to study constitutional fiscal constraint, law, economics, and politics.This paper was finished in early 2015, so it is slightly out-of-date as of its posting through the Social Science Research Network in March 2016. But the paper does provide timely context for Gov. Kasich’s time as Ohio Governor, as he finds himself on the national stage in a race for the White House.

Systemic risk, financial markets, and performance of financial institutions

This paper studies the exposure and contribution of financial institutions to systemic risks in financial markets. We employ three popular indicators of a financial institution’s exposure to systemic risks: the systemic risk index (SRISK) and marginal expected shortfall (MES) of Brownlees and Engle (Volatility, correlation and tails for systemic risk measurement, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY, 2012) and the conditional Value-at-Risk (CoVaR) of Adrian and Brunnermeier (2011). We use a primary database of Taiwan financial institutions for our empirical study. A panel contains data of stock market returns and balance sheets of 31 Taiwan financial institutions for 2005–2014. We focus on systemic risk analysis so as to understand the dynamics of volatility, interdependency, and risk during the recent financial crisis. We then report the time series dynamics and cross sectional rankings of these systemic risk measures. The main results indicate that although these three measures differ in their definition of the contributions to systemic risk, all are quite similar in identifying systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). Moreover, we find empirical evidence that systemic risk contributions are closely related to certain institution characteristic factors. The results of the Granger causality tests prove that a systemic risk measure is a great alternative tool for monitoring early warning signals of distress in the real economy.

Inec and Kogi State 2015 Gubernatorial Election: Fair is Fair!

On Tuesday, November 24, 2015, I published an article on the Social Science Research Network titled “Kogi State 2015 Gubernatorial Election and Matters Arising”, where I examined legal issues arising from the just concluded Kogi State Gubernatorial election; and considered the legal implications of the sudden death of the gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kogi State, Prince Abubakar Audu, who was said to have died of undisclosed medical reasons, shortly after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared his victory at the elections inconclusive. I also discussed the controversies as to what exactly the position of the law is: whether James Abiodun Faleke (who was the deputy gubernatorial candidate before Audu’s death) automatically becomes the governorship candidate of the APC and whether in the event that Faleke automatically becomes the gubernatorial candidate, Faleke, can on his own, nominate a deputy or should, in consultation with his party, nominate a new deputy to represent the party in the supplementary elections. Barely few hours after my publication, INEC, like a nursing mother waking up from her slumber having heard the cry of her child, attempted to rise to the occasion by attempting to proffer a solution going forward. In INEC’s wisdom (made more concrete and backed by the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minsiter of Justice’s allegedly biased legal opinion), the APC was to fill the vacuum created by the death of its Kogi State governorship election candidate, Abubakar Audu, in order to continue with supplementary election which is to hold on Saturday, December 5, 2015, in the remaining 91 polling units where election was cancelled. As if it that was not enough, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) quickly took advantage of the situation and wrote INEC to declare its candidate, Governor Idris Wada, as the winner of the gubernatorial election held on November 21, 2015 in Kogi State (earlier declared by INEC to be inconclusive). The PDP’s position, made known through its National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh, was that with the death of the APC’s candidate, Prince Abubakar Audu, the APC has “legally crashed out” of the race. The PDP is also seeking the exclusion of the APC from the supplementary election slated for December 5, 2015 and is insisting that with the death of the APC candidate, Prince Abubakar Audu, “the APC has legally crashed out of the governorship race as no known law or constitutional provision allows the substituting of candidates, once the ballot process has commenced.” Meanwhile, in a twist of events, the James Faleke, the running mate of the late Prince Audu, APC Gubernatorial Candidate has written INEC, through his Counsel, Chief Wole Olanipekun SAN: (x) to declare James Faleke winner of the poll and that INEC erred by declaring the November 21, 2015 Gubernatorial election as inconclusive after the emergence of a clear winner; (y) that it is not only unconstitutional but also misleading for INEC to direct the APC to conduct a fresh primary election to nominate Audu’s replacement in the supplementary election scheduled for December 5, 2015; and (z) that INEC usurped the functions of an election petitions tribunal by declaring the poll inconclusive and scheduling a supplementary election. In Chief Wole Olanipekun’s words: “In law and logic, no new candidate can inherit or be a beneficiary of the votes already cast, counted and declared by INEC before that candidate was nominated and purportedly sponsored…Assuming without conceding that INEC is even right to order a supplementary election, the votes already cast, counted and declared on Saturday, 25th November 2015, were votes for the joint constitutional ticket of Prince Abubakar Audu and our client…Therefore, no new or ‘supplementary’ candidate can hijack, aggregate, appropriate or inherit the said votes.” Given the differing interpretation of the Constitution and the relevant provisions of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended in 2014) (Electoral Act), I am of the opinion that there is no better time to provide legal guidance as to what the intention of the drafters of our Constitution is than now.

The role of arXiv, RePEc, SSRN and PMC in formal scholarly communication

Purpose– The four major Subject Repositories (SRs), arXiv, Research Papers in Economics (RePEc), Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central (PMC), are all important within their disciplines but no previous study has systematically compared how often they are cited in academic publications. In response, the purpose of this paper is to report an analysis of citations to SRs from Scopus publications, 2000-2013.Design/methodology/approach– Scopus searches were used to count the number of documents citing the four SRs in each year. A random sample of 384 documents citing the four SRs was then visited to investigate the nature of the citations.Findings– Each SR was most cited within its own subject area but attracted substantial citations from other subject areas, suggesting that they are open to interdisciplinary uses. The proportion of documents citing each SR is continuing to increase rapidly, and the SRs all seem to attract substantial numbers of citations from more than one discipline.Research limitations/implications– Scopus does not cover all publications, and most citations to documents found in the four SRs presumably cite the published version, when one exists, rather than the repository version.Practical implications– SRs are continuing to grow and do not seem to be threatened by institutional repositories and so research managers should encourage their continued use within their core disciplines, including for research that aims at an audience in other disciplines.Originality/value– This is the first simultaneous analysis of Scopus citations to the four most popular SRs.

Spreadsheets and the Violence of Forms: Tracking Organisational and Domestic Use

Spreadsheets and the Violence of Forms: Tracking Organisational and Domestic Use

Economics of Regulation and the Rule of Law in Korea

Ahn, Y. D..May, 2015.Economics of regulation and the rule of law in Korea,Reports,[Rochester]Social Science Research Network

Social Comparisons and Deception Across Workplace Hierarchies: Field and Experimental Evidence

We examine how unfavorable social comparisons differentially spur employees of varying hierarchical levels to engage in deception. Drawing on literatures in social psychology and workplace self-esteem, we theorize that negative comparisons cause senior employees to seek to improve reported relative performance measures via deception. In a first study, we use deceptive self-downloads on the Social Science Research Network, the leading working paper repository in the social sciences, to show that employees higher in a hierarchy are more likely to engage in deception, particularly when the employee has enjoyed a high level of past success. In a second study, we confirm this finding in two scenario-based experiments. Our results suggest that longer-tenured and more successful employees face a greater loss of self-esteem from negative social comparisons, and they are more likely engage in deception in response to reported performance that is lower than that of peers.

PROTOCOL: Reducing Unemployment Benefit Duration to Increase Job Finding Rates: Protocol for a Systematic Review

PROTOCOL: Reducing Unemployment Benefit Duration to Increase Job Finding Rates: Protocol for a Systematic Review