Psychology's influence on constitutional interpretation

When organized psychology files amicus briefs with the Supreme Court and other courts, it does so for a variety of reasons and seeks to advance a number of policy objectives. The thesis of this article is that pursuit of some of those objectives is improper and that their pursuit threatens to defeat other objectives. Psychology's expertise is not in constitutional analysis; it is in the study of human behavior. As a practical matter, to pretend to do the former is to weaken our effectiveness in describing the latter. In public interest cases, when acting as a true friend of the court, APA's obligation is to share with the court what empirical research and theory tell us about human behavior, and not to argue for any particular outcome of the case before the court.     

A macroeconomic simulation for Greece in the wake of its government debt crisis

Economic Change and Restructuring - This paper simulates the macroeconomics of Greece following its 2009 government debt crisis that precipitated a 4-year depression with stagnant growth since. A...     

A tragedy of the anticommons: local option taxation and cell phone tax bills

When multiple taxing jurisdictions overlap and fail to account for one another’s actions, they over-tax the common base. This is a prediction of the anticommons model, in which numerous parties have authority to exclude others from using a resource. This model further predicts that when governments over-tax the base, private parties will underutilize the resource, and underutilization will be greater as the number of parties with exclusion rights rises. We test these predictions by studying cell phone taxation and local option tax authority, which allows some cities, counties, and special-purpose districts to levy taxes on cell phone use. Consistent with theory, we find that the tax rate on cell phone service is higher when local governments have the option to tax. Further, the percentage of households owning cell phones is lower when there is the local option to tax, and ownership rates fall with the number of taxes levied.