Some state insurance regulators have been using their regulatory muscle to coerce insurers into furthering their political ends. They have protected favored but harmful commercial activity and have strangled legal but disfavored individual conduct.In the process, those regulators have disabled...

Collateralized debt obligations with asset backed securities as collateral (ABS CDOs) often getovershadowed in debates over causes of large commercial bank holding company (BHC) distressduring the 2007–2009 crisis. For BHCs, the Recourse Rule made holding the highest rated ABS CDO tranches...

This paper explains how history, economics, public policy, and culture have combined to make Tokyo a city full of microspaces and how those microspaces shape Tokyo’s land use possibilities. Today’s Tokyo is a “new” city, having been largely rebuilt from scratch after wartime devastation,...

Many US cities implemented indoor vaccine mandates to incentivize citizens to get vaccinated and reduce the spread of COVID-19. Previous research finds that similar country-level mandates increased vaccine uptake substantially. However, with city-level mandates, unvaccinated individuals could...

Many policymakers and economists are surprised by the recent high and persistent inflation. This naturally raises questions about what caused it and why it was so unexpected. This paper argues that the quantity theory of money provides a useful framework for forecasting inflation. Anyone...

Government regulations influence virtually every interaction between a health care provider and a patient in the United States. Yet researchers have often struggled to capture the systematic role healthcare regulations play in health outcomes. The Healthcare Openness and Access Project (HOAP),...

This paper explores the differences in incentives and thus behavior between for-profit and not-for-profit firms. I investigate a terrible choice nursing homes faced during the pandemic: isolate residents to prevent deaths from COVID-19 but doing so may increase total deaths by aggravating mental...

The existing literature on price changes in the housing market between 2002 and 2010 has largely focused on temporary sources of demand—loosening and then tightening of credit markets or trend-following speculative activity. Using a new variable that quantifies the effect of inelastic supply...

Since the Great Recession, US discretionary fiscal policy has turned more countercyclical in response to negative output gaps. Previously, automatic stabilizers and discretionary fiscal policy contributed about equally to changes in the federal deficit. But discretionary policy worked against...

In the past, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has been able to bring down inflation through contractionary monetary policy only at the cost of recession. Despite this history, in their comments on current policy, FOMC participants do not draw lessons from that experience. There is no...