Barack Obama and John McCain have staked out very different positions on serious questions involving economic regulation, everything from housing finance to alternative energy mandates, but practical considerations will dissolve many of these differences

With Wall Street still reeling from the mortgage meltdown, the Federal Reserve now seemingly committed to rescuing big investment banks "too complex to fail," and the U.S. Treasury proposing a top-to-bottom reorganization of financial regulation, pieties about the virtues of unfettered markets...

This essay briefly reviews public policies for spectrum use, distinguishing among them by whether economists agree on their value and why. Such policies could have a large impact on the development of the Internet and the pace of technological change in the wireless industry. We conclude that...

In February, the European Competition Commission fined Microsoft $1.35 billion in what was just the latest in a long line of antitrust cases against the company. Ironically, though, whatever market power Microsoft possessed was already ebbing by the time the company became mired in legal battles...

The late housing boom, in which borrowers largely forgot that prices can go down as well as up, attracted some unsavory brokers and left many consumers facing foreclosure. The Fed is under great pressure to triangulate between Congressional Democrats' desire for New Deal-style regulation and the...

Not so long ago, $1 billion seemed worth worrying about - as Everett Dirksen, the late senator from Illinois, was supposed to have said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Today, another trillion-dollar commitment by the Federal Reserve makes headlines...

In October 2010, a group of leading thinkers on environmental policy met at the Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester for a conference in honour of Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling. This column presents a 10-point guideline for climate change policy co-authored by 26...

As economists, we believe that the Second Circuit's ruling, by not allowing the consideration of important information about the relationships between the benefits and costs of alternatives, is economically unsound. In particular, we believe that, as a general principle, regulators cannot make...

The recent sharp increase in the price of oil has generated renewed interest in U.S. oil exploration and development. This paper examines the likely impact of developing new energy resources on oil and gasoline prices. In addition, we use a benefit-cost framework to analyze the impact of...

As we understand it, the D.C. Circuit did not allow the EPA to consider the costs of complying with ozone and PM NAAQS. As we further understand it, this legal ruling can be overturned only by this Court. As economists, we believe that the D.C. Circuit's ruling not allowing the EPA to consider...