Banking reforms — that reduced interest rates — boosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class families. We define “able” students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We define “middle class” as families in...

This article presents salient features of the United States Department of Transportation's decision to deregulation the airline computer reservation systems (CRS) industry and argues that such deregulation may be revisited if market forces and available antitrust enforcement is unable to effect...

The worldwide spread of economic and political liberalism was the defining feature of the late twentieth century. Free-market-oriented economic reforms -- macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization of foreign economic policies, privatization, and deregulation -- took root in many parts of the...

The Dodd-Frank Act will eliminate the requirement that credit products must be rated before they can be sold to banks and pension funds. Supporters argue that if the information in ratings is valuable, issuers or investors will choose to buy the information, even without the requirement. But...

We develop a two-sector growth model of vertical structure in which the upstream sector features Cournot competition and produces intermediate goods that are used in the downstream sector for the production of final goods. In such a vertical structure, we show that deregulation and increased...

Subsidies induce a market inefficiency by creating a deadweight loss, since supply and demand are out of equilibrium. In 2016, electricity subsidies were the largest component of the total global energy subsides, with an estimated 128 billion USD out of 287 billion USD. Electricity generation is...

Efficient constitutional change depends on ability of bargaining parties to overcome such inherent problems of political change as commitment and credibility (Galiani, Torrens, and Yanguas, 2014; Congleton, 2011; Boettke and Coyne, 2009). This paper studies how constitutional bargaining leads to a...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, states issued and then rescinded stay-at-home orders that restricted mobility. We develop a model of learning by deregulation, which predicts that lifting stay-at-home orders can signal that going out has become safer. Using restaurant activity data, we find that...