Natural resource funds are created to advance their home state interests. However, because they are more active as sovereign wealth funds invested within host states, overwhelming attention has been on their regulation to safeguard transnational interests. Meanwhile, they are only effective when...

E-commerce has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years. Nonetheless, senators, privacy watchdog groups, and the Federal Trade Commission have argued that e-commerce is being held back by consumer worries about online privacy and security. Some privacy advocates are calling for...

Natural gas extracted form shale reached record production totals in 2015 in the United States and the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts natural gas production will continue to increase. Wastes from shale gas extraction can contain the radioactive isotopes radium-226 (Ra-226)...

This paper discusses contributions that industrial organization economists have made to our understanding of energy markets and environmental regulation. We emphasize the substantive contributions of recent papers while also highlighting how this literature has adopted and sometimes augmented...

The rise of the sharing economy has changed how many Americans commute, shop, vacation, and borrow. It has also disrupted long-established industries, from taxis to hotels, and has confounded policymakers. In particular, regulators are trying to determine how to apply many of the traditional...

This essay considers the role of reputational information in our marketplace. It explains how well-functioning marketplaces depend on the vibrant flow of accurate reputational information, and how misdirected regulation of reputational information could harm marketplace mechanisms. It then...

The United States represents the world’s largest market for pharmaceutical drugs. It is also the only advanced economy in the world that does not regulate drug prices. There is no upper threshold for the prices of medicines in the United States. List prices are instead set by manufacturers in...

The rapid proliferation of connected devices has the potential to transform and enrich our lives and to drive significant productivity gains in the broader economy. However, the lack of sufficient security in many “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices creates a meaningful risk to consumers and...

There has been on-going discussion regarding the alignment of cloud computing services to a range of European policy objectives. This paper provides an outline of key legal and regulatory aspects arising from recent calls for establishing a Europe-only cloud. After covering the background to...