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...