Trump signs the largest rollback of financial regulations since the 2008 crisis into law; Zuckerberg masterfully evades the questions of European parliamentarians; Amazon has developed a “powerful and dangerous” new facial recognition system; and why don’t health insurers mind big hospital bills?
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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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We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences are a major source of inequality as well, argue Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in this extract from their new book The Captured Economy.
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Back in the 1960s, George Stigler called into question whether states should require firms to publicly report their financials. A recent Stigler Center working paper revisits this issue and measures the impact of the different levels of financial reporting and auditing mandates around Europe on resource allocation.
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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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This week in political economy.
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This week in political economy.
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This week in political economy.
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If you want to understand how the US economy is producing big gains for those at the top and stagnation for everybody else, the financial sector is clearly a big piece of the puzzle. Is finance really overregulated, or simply misregulated?
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A pioneering new study provides a first-of-its-kind look into the outsized effect that lobbying and political maneuverings have on health care spending.
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