It will thus be readily seen that the chief aims of this Act are to secure: (1) That no person is received as a patient into a mental hospital or other approved place unless of a certainty he is a lunatic within the meaning of the Lunacy Act., i.e., an idiot or a person of unsound mind, (2) That a person so admitted shall be discharged immediately he is no longer certifiable as a person of unso...

This paper develops a conceptual model that analyzes the impact of increasing market transparency under the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999 on the incentives for collusion in the U.S. meatpacking industry. More than likely, meatpackers will have asymmetric priors regarding the distribution of livestock prices. Moreover, they lack the incentives to voluntarily reveal their real priors....

Since welfare reform, impoverished children in single-parent families receive less aid than under the previous system and the most disadvantaged of these children have slipped deeper into poverty. This Research-in-Brief summarizes a study that explores the economic well-being of children in low-income single-parent families since the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportun...

Using data from the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment and subsequent follow-up surveys, we estimate unconditional quantile treatment effects of being assigned to a small-size class and a regular-size class with an aide, compared to regular-size one. Results show that mid-achievers profit the most from being assigned to a small class. Students at the bottom or top of the ach...

Robyn Ott is a third-year law student at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. She is also the Managing Editor of the Oklahoma Journal of Law and Technology for the 2004-2005 academic year. Ms. Ott wrote this eBrief under the direction of Professor Drew Kershen while working on the Project on Intellectual Property Rights in Living Matter. Below, Ms. Ott discusses the legal effect of India’...

Multinationals are increasingly conducting R&D in countries such as India and China, where intellectual property rights (IPR) protection is still very weak. This paper examines this puzzle. The argument is that weak IPR leads to low returns to innovation and thus low prices of innovative talents. Multinational firms who possess not only the capabilities to utilize these talents, but also the in...

Private rights in living objects have always been controversial. Agriculture provided the first wave in human civilization. Therefore, agriculture including plant breeding and agricultural methods pre-dated any form of IPR protection unlike industry and commerce. Traditionally, IPR was not applied to agriculture. In recent times, this position has changed and increasingly agriculture is seen as...

The South Korean government passed the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, known henceforth as the Bioethics Act,in 2003 and it took effect in 2005. South Korea?s Ministry of Health and Welfare proposed the law to the South Korean National Assembly to allow the progress of biotechnology and life sciences research in South Korea while protecting human research subjects with practices such as informed c...