Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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Why were Puerto Rico’s economic and financial troubles not reflected in its bond yields prior to its 2016 default? A Stigler Center working paper explores the possibility that this puzzle is related to government involvement in financial markets.
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Mounk, author of the recent book The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It, talks to ProMarket about populist authoritarians and undemocratic liberalism.
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What can policymakers do to prevent future financial crises? An emerging consensus holds that so-called macroprudential regulation is key: policies that aim to mitigate risks to the financial system as a whole. In a recent paper, Karsten Müller of Princeton shows that such policies were systematically loosened in the run-up to two-hundred seventeen elections across 58 countries. This raises the question of whether regulators can, in practice, withstand political pressures.
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In an interview with ProMarket, former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Paul Tucker explains why the “unelected power” of central bankers threatens our system of government.
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Enforcing environmental regulations is controversial and can be costly. But researchers at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon have proposed a low-cost alternative for enforcement—disclosing emissions by live-streaming videos of pollution online—and here offer some preliminary evidence on how well it works.
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Does direct democracy make regulatory capture harder for industry? Samantha Eyler-Driscoll looks at a new Stigler Center working paper that examines state-level referenda and initiatives from 1904 to 2017; it finds that economic interests are largely on the defensive when these types of popular measures go on the ballot.
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New research documents a sharp increase in the number of corporate executives in elected federal office between 1980 and 2014. But why do they run? And what consequences does it have for their firms and for aggregate policy?
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Three hundred years of financial regulation offer a cautionary tale to today’s push against yesterday’s regulations. This column revisits the political economy of financial crises and documents a consistent pattern of politically driven procyclical regulations. These regulatory cycles have a poor track record.
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Much government regulation does not fit the logic of Stigler’s theory of anti-competitive regulatory capture. In a new book, Steven Vogel of Berkeley argues that the theory of regulation needs to account for the phenomenon of captured regulators bent on deregulating—and that the critical consideration facing regulators is no longer how to enhance competition, but how different governance models favor different actors.
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To accompany Paul Tucker’s mini-course at the Stigler Center this week, we offer here an extract of the former Bank of England Deputy Governor’s ambitious new tome Unelected Power: The Question for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State.
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The European Economic Association has announced that this year’s Hicks Tinbergen medal will go to ProMarket editor and Stigler Center faculty director Luigi Zingales and his coauthors Luigi Guiso and Paola Sapienza for their 2016 paper “Long-Term Persistence.” Here, a current coauthor of Sapienza and Zingales credits the prizewinners with helping to make the study of informal institutions mainstream in economics.
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