What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

Regulations impose idiosyncratic capital and funding costs for holding derivatives. Capital requirements are costly because derivatives desks are risky businesses; funding is costly in part because regulations increase the minimum funding tenor. Idiosyncratic costs mean no single measure makes...

Since the dawn of the concept of nation-states, many nations have been planning their economies to increase people's prosperity and standard of living. All economies have a centralised feature where decisions are taken. But data collection and plan implementation has been cumbersome because of...

For over a decade, I have been promoting a Free To Choose Medicine (FTCM) initiative in op-eds, journal articles, interviews, and monographs. FTCM would break the FDA's monopoly on access to new drugs. It would enable patients, advised by their doctors, to make informed decisions about using...

Unintended consequences manifest themselves in many aspects of socioeconomic life. We develop a model of unintended consequences (UC) of novel policies. In our setup, the policymaker is unaware of the UC of her policy. We discuss several approaches to evaluating policy in terms of welfare...

We develop a theory that addresses the problem of the existence of stable vaccine allocations in a political economy. These are allocation policies that a political leader can enforce without losing their popularity. Our analysis distinguishes between contexts where vaccination has positive...

The battle over immigration reform is a recent manifestation of a long debate over the relationship between the United States and other countries. To economists, these issues are easy. Since at least the work of David Ricardo (1772-1823), economists have known that international trade is...

Robust control theory is a tool for assessing decision rules when a decision maker distrusts either the specification of transition laws or the distribution of hidden state variables or both. Specification doubts inspire the decision maker to want a decision rule to work well for a ∅ of models...

The objective of this paper is to establish design criteria for developing a global brain that is integrated with humanity to govern life on the planet in a satisfactory environment. Three sources of design criteria are identified. (i) The limited ability of humans to: receive, manipulate,...