This paper compares the effects on corporate performance and managerial self-dealing in a situation in which a (privately informed) CEO reports to a single Board that is responsible for both monitoring management and establishing performance targets to an alternative in which the CEO reports to...

In January 2008, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research hosted a workshop on addressing recent legislation creating a “cap-and-trade” system. Four key issues: (1) linking the California market to other GHG markets and control policies, including those in other states, Europe, and...

I develop a general equilibrium model populated by agents with varying degrees of hyperbolic discounting who vote for a uniform savings floor. Although partial equilibrium intuition suggests that all individuals will prefer to have some constraint on their consumption/savings decision, I find...

Human embryonic stem cell research has become both controversial and salient as a political issue. Limitations on federal support for this research that were announced by the President on August 9, 2001. These limitations have given rise to several state-sponsored research programs, most notably...

There are three analytically distinct layers of the phenomenon or condition that has been labeled “the anticommons,” and indicted as a potential impediment that patenting and enforcement of IPR may impose on innovative activity. The first part of the paper distinguishes between the layers of...

Television rights are the largest component of revenues for major sports in large, rich nations. Among these nations, the market structure for rights varies due to different competition policies towards sports and television. This essay examines how game coverage, revenues and competitive...

Why is regulatory reform and deregulation so difficult to achieve? Using the example of proposed federal regulation of (apparently non-existent) wholesale-level bundling of video networks, I explore the non-economic motivations for economic regulation. It appears that the political system...

Vocational education in high schools has frequently been stigmatized as an anachronistic, dead-end path for students. We use data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 to examine claims that students on a vocational track would benefit from a more academically rigorous...

This paper examines the 100-fold increase in reserve balances at the Fed during the second half of 2008. By looking at the balance sheet of the Fed and the factors influencing the supply and demand for reserves, the paper shows that the increase was due to large purchases of securities and loans...

Economists view intellectual property rights (IPRs) as policy tools for encouraging innovation, but they recognize that they can also inhibit competition. There are many types of IPRs and of institutions concerned with their administration. We begin by outlining how these complex and varied...