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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Livestreaming Polluters to Enforce Environmental Policy: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Pittsburgh
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 Reduce Regulatory Capture?
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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Why Are So Many Executives Running for Office These Days?
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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How Politicians Intensify Financial Cycles: 300 Years of Pro-Cyclical Regulation
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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Rethinking Stigler’s Theory of Regulation: Regulatory Capture or Deregulatory Capture?
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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The Only Game in Town: Central Banking as False Hope
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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Prize-Winning Innovations in Measuring Civic Capital and Its Effects
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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What Glue Holds Communist Capitalism Together in China? Cronyism
With a few cronyist tweaks, China’s communist leaders made capitalism safe for Party rule. But will cronyism become China’s next booming export?
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What Insights Do Taxi Rides Offer into Federal Reserve Leakage?
Does investment-relevant information leak from the Fed? A new Stigler Center working paper finds surprising and novel evidence in a public dataset.
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Guns and Votes: The Victory of an Intense Minority Against an Apathetic Majority
This column on the “gun-control paradox”—the fact that gun regulations continually fail in the US Congress despite being supported by around 90 percent of US citizens—appeared in 2013 on VoxEU.org after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and was republished in 2017 after the Las Vegas mass shooting. Following the Parkland mass shooting, we are republishing it with a new preface by one of the coauthors.
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The Other World Bank Scandal: A New Study Documents How Corporate Collusion Hurts the Bank’s Credibility—and Harms Sustainable Development
While the World Bank scrambles to contain the Doing Business rankings firestorm, a new paper by Rabia Malik and Randall Stone traces a more insidious source of partiality in how the Bank does development work.
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