I offer both a moral and a macroeconomic case for institutionalizing continuous public operations in labor markets analogous to continuous Fed operations in money markets. The macroeconomic case stems from prevailing wage and salary rates' status as what I call ‘systemically important prices'...

Ten years after failing and being rescued by our federal government, our nation's principal secondary market makers in home mortgage loans – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – remain in federal receivership. The proximate reason for this is that neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have...

The hallmark of a collective action problem is its aggregating multiple individually rational decisions into a collectively irrational outcome. Arms races, “commons tragedies” and “prisoners' dilemmas” are well-known, indeed well-worn examples. What seem to be less widely appreciated are...

A remarkable yet seldom noted set of parallels exists between modern U.S. bank regulation, on the one hand, and what used to be garden-variety American corporate law, on the other hand. For example, just as bank charters are matters not of right but of conditional privilege even today, so were...

Some prices and indices in national or transnational markets take on particular market-wide importance, either because (a) they are associated with ubiquitous inputs to production, (b) they are associated with highly popular asset classes, (c) they tend by convention to be used as benchmarks in...

The nation's recent financial crisis brought into sharp relief fundamental questions concerning the social function and purpose of the financial system, including its relation to the "real" economy. This Article argues that, to answer these questions, we must recapture a distinctively American...

Many people recognize that governments can play salutary roles in relation to markets by (a) “overseeing” market behavior from “above,” or (b) supplying foundational “rules of the game” from “below.” It is probably no accident that these widely recognized roles also sit...

This brief symposium contribution takes stock of the 'behavioralist turn' in classical decision theory, finding in its systematic endogenizing of preferences a close cousin to efforts to situate the 'unsituated self' of classical liberal justice theory. It finds that this turn has not only...

A growing body of post-crisis legal and economic literature suggests that future financial crises might be averted by tinkering with the internal governance structures of banks and other financial institutions. In particular, contributors to this literature propose tightening the fiduciary...

It is common for normative legal theorists, economists and other policy analysts to conduct and communicate their work mainly in maximizing terms. They take the maximization of welfare, for example, or of wealth or utility, to be primary objectives of legislation and public policy. Few if any of...