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An Analysis Of The Global Oil Market In 2020, Nicholas Carlson

Senior Honors Theses

Twenty-twenty represented one of the most volatile periods of history for the oil market. This volatility was reflected in market prices, with oil futures going negative in April 2020 and ending the year closer to pre-pandemic levels. As the year progressed, geopolitical tensions, a global pandemic, price wars, hurricanes, and vaccine innovation all contributed to the fluctuations in global demand and supply for oil. The year opened in January with oil prices rising following U.S. airstrikes targeting an Iranian high-ranking military official. February and March saw the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which ushered in a dramatic demand shock unprecedent …

Plato’S Market Optimism, Brennan Mcdavid

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Despite the extensiveness of top-down control in his ideal city, Plato takes seriously the idea that the market does not require total regulation via legislation and that participants in the market may be capable of self-regulation. This paper examines the discussion of market regulation in the Republic and argues that the philosopher rulers play a very limited role in regulating market activities. Indeed, they are concerned only with averting excesses of wealth and poverty. The rules and regulations that are foundational to the daily functioning of the market – enforcement of contracts, resolution of disputes, etc. – are endogenous to …

Introduction To Macroeconomics, Kenny Christianson

Economics Faculty Scholarship

The textbook begins by looking at basic economic concepts and models, such as scarcity, choice, model-building, opportunity cost, production possibilities curves, comparative advantage, and supply and demand analysis. After a chapter exploring the relationships between markets and government, the text then delves into a rigorous analysis of the theory and practice of macroeconomics. Topics include the measurement of macroeconomic variables, macroeconomic models, and fiscal and monetary policy. The text emphasizes the connections between theory and policy in exploring the field of macroeconomics.

Mapping Racial Capitalism: Implications For Law, Carmen G. Gonzalez, Athena D. Mutua

Journal Articles

The theory of racial capitalism offers insights into the relationship between class and race, providing both a structural and a historical account of the ways in which the two are linked in the global economy. Law plays an important role in this. This article sketches what we believe are two key structural features of racial capitalism: profit-making and race-making for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, …

Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent works have sharply criticized public pension funds and labor union funds (“labor’s capital”). These critiques come from both the left and right. Leftists criticize labor’s capital for undermining worker interests by funding financialization and the growth of Wall Street. Laissez-faire conservatives argue that pension underfunding threatens taxpayers. The left calls for pensions to be replaced by a larger social security system. The libertarian right calls for them to be smashed and scattered into individually-managed 401(k)s. I review this recent work, some of which is aimed at my book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, …

Does Democracy Justify Zoning?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

One common argument for restrictive zoning is that zoning is more democratic than allowing landowners to build what they please. This article critiques that claim, suggesting that free markets are equally democratic because they allow for self-rule. Moreover, zoning is less democratic than other forms of government decisionmaking, because zoning hearings are often sparsely attended, and commenters at public meetings are unrepresentative of the public as a whole.

Appreciating The Overlooked Contributions Of The New Harvard School, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

My colleague, Herbert Hovenkamp, is almost universally recognized as the most cited and the most authoritative US antitrust scholar. Among his many honors, his status as the senior author of the authoritative Areeda and Hovenkamp treatise makes him the unquestioned leader of the New Harvard School, which has long served as the bellwether for how courts are likely to resolve emerging issues in modern antitrust doctrine. Unfortunately, its defining tenets and its positions on emerging issues remain surprisingly obscure. My contribution to this festschrift explores the core commitments that distinguish the New Harvard School from other approaches to antitrust. It …

Law Library Blog (June 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Market As Negotiation, Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

Our economic system counts on markets to allocate most of our societal resources. The law often treats markets as discrete entities, with a native intelligence and structure that provides clear answers to questions about prices and terms. In reality, of course, markets are much messier—they are agglomerations of negotiations by individual parties. Despite theoretical and empirical work on markets and on negotiation, legal scholars have largely overlooked the connection between the two areas in considering how markets are constructed and regulated.

This Article brings together scholarship in law, economics, sociology, and psychology to better understand the role that negotiation plays …

Introduction, Daniel A. Crane, Samuel Gregg

Other Publications

The regulation of economic life, whether through law or politics, has been a fixture of daily life from time immemorial. Formal regulation occurs through a variety of formal devices, the efficacy of which is argued about by legal scholars, economists, policymakers, legislators, and governments. Even expressions like “to regulate” or “to deregulate” carry a range of political and even moral connotations, depending on who is using the phrase and how they are deploying it.

Is There A Delaware Effect For Controlled Firms?, Edward Fox

Articles

The impact of Delaware incorporation on firm value remains a central question in corporate law. Despite the difficulty scholars have had in agreeing on an answer to this question, there is a consensus that Delaware has long enjoyed stable and important advantages in the expertise of its judiciary and its extensive case law. These advantages are believed to be particularly important for firms with a controlling shareholder. This Article attempts to empirically measure the effect of Delaware incorporation on these controlled firms and thus helps us understand the market value of Delaware’s judiciary and case law. It finds, surprisingly, that …

Christianity And Antitrust, Kenneth G. Elzinga, Daniel Crane

Book Chapters

The purpose of this chapter is to consider whether the Christian faith has a nexus with the institution of antitrust. It turns out it doesn’t – and it does. For example, Christianity cannot explain why the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index is superior to the four-firm concentration ratio as a measure of industry concentration. Economics can. On the other hand, economics cannot explain why the per se rule against price-fixing is morally appropriate. The Bible can.

Six Scandals: Why We Need Consumer Protection Laws Instead Of Just Markets, Jeff Sovern

Faculty Publications

Markets are powerful mechanisms for serving consumers. Some critics of regulation have suggested that markets also provide consumer protection. For example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said “Consumers don’t have to be hemmed in by rules and regulations. They’re protected by the market itself.” This Article’s first goal is to test the claim that the market provides consumer protection by examining several recent incidents in which companies mistreated consumers and then explores whether consumers stopped patronizing the companies, which would deter misconduct. The issue also has normative implications because if markets consistently protected consumers, society would need fewer regulations and …

Clean Meat: Did We Under Or Over Estimate How Far This New Industry Could Grow?, Tyler R. Glick

Honors Theses - Providence Campus

Soon lab-grown meat will be on the market for everyday consumers to purchase, but will it be successful as the companies producing it are predicting? Scholarly discussions on lab-grown meat are in their beginning stages with most attention being directed toward the production process (Kowitt 2017; Mitchell 2017: Schwartz & Conley 2018). The late decade of the 2010’s saw an increasing amount of coverage and interest in lab-grown meat. As the technology continues to advance, I hypothesize thatlab-grown meat will become more readily available to consumers; however, I question whether or not consumers are ready for such a change even …

Comovement In The Cryptocurrency Market, Benjamin M. Blau, Todd Griffith, Ryan J. Whitby

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This study examines the comovement between 17 of the most active cryptocurrencies. We are unable to statistically reject the presence of perfect comovement between Bitcoin and six of the 16 non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies. Consistent with the friction-based explanation for the presence of comovement, once the CBOE introduced futures contracts on Bitcoin, we find that all 16 cryptocurrencies comove with Bitcoin. These results suggest that introducing futures contracts improves the informational environment of the entire cryptocurrency market, which helps explain the unusual comovement in the cryptocurrency market.

Extended Validation In The Dark Web: Evidence From Investigation Of The Certification Services And Products Sold On Darknet Markets, David Maimon, Yubao Wu, Nicholas Stubler, Praneeth Singirikonda

EBCS Reports

TLS certificates fulfill two critical security functions. First, the certificate plays a key role in authenticating and verifying the identity of a host, client or application. Second, it enables the encryption of data exchanged between a client and a ser ver. To support the sensitive operation of identity verification, SSL/TLS certificates are supposed to be issued by trusted certificate authorities (CAs) who verify and check that companies are legitimate in order to reduce the risk of fraud and establish trust in a website or service.

However, in March 2019, the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group at the Andrew Young School of …

The Segregation Of Markets, Christian Turner

Scholarly Works

Campaign-finance reformers fear that rich donors’ money can be used disproportionately to influence the content of campaign advertising and thus, perhaps, the results of elections. In European football, UEFA has attempted to ban “financial doping,” rich owners’ use of money earned in sectors other than football to pay large sums for the best football players. Campaign-finance reform efforts and “financial fair play” rules in sport may seem like bespoke solutions to different problems. In fact, they are the same solution to the same problem. Both are attempts to ensure that power accumulated in one market is not brought into another …

Broadening Consumer Law: Competition, Protection, And Distribution, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws, defined as the set of consumer protection, antitrust, and entry barrier laws that govern consumer transactions. Consumer law is overlooked partly because tax law is cast as the most efficient way to redistribute. Another obstacle is that consumer law research speaks to microeconomic and siloed contexts—deceptive fees by Wells Fargo or a proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Even removing millions of dollars of deceptive credit card fees across the nation seems trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent …

Ecosystem Competition And The Antitrust Laws, Daniel A. Crane

Articles

Conventional antitrust norms analyze market power—as a stepping stone to anticompetitive effects and, hence, prohibited conduct—from the perspective of product substitutability. Two goods or services are said to compete with one another when they are reasonably interchangeable from the perspective of consumers, or to put it in more formal economic terms, when there is cross-elasticity of demand between them. Conversely, when two goods or services are not reasonably interchangeable, they are not horizontally related and are said not to compete with one another. Since a concern over horizontal agreements and horizontal effects dominate antitrust—courts even analyze vertical agreement or merger …

Tax Talk And Reproductive Technology, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The tax system both reacts to and helps create attitudes about the value of certain behaviors and choices. This Article makes three principal claims—one empirical, one normative, and one interpretative. The Article demonstrates through data that a representative sample of fertility clinics in the United States does not make information about the tax consequences of compensated human egg transfers—commonly called egg “donation”—publicly available. In 2015, in a case of first impression, the United States Tax Court decided in Perez v. Commissioner that a compensated egg transferor must report as income any amount she receives for her eggs. Although the Tax …

Product Categories As Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening Of The Investment Industry, Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Rodolphe Durand

Business Publications

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition, for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications …

Democracy And The Epistemic Limits Of Markets, Kevin J. Elliott

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

A recent line of argument insists that replacing democracy with markets would improve social decision making due to markets’ superior use of knowledge. These arguments are flawed by unrealistic assumptions, unfair comparisons, and a neglect of the epistemic limits of markets. In reality, the epistemic advantages of markets over democracy are circumscribed and often illusory. A recognition of markets’ epistemic limits can, however, provide guidance for designing institutions in ways that capture the advantages of both.

Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss

ESI Working Papers

The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate islands can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The former minimize trade costs through monetary exchange; the latter maximizes overall surplus through non-monetary exchange. Monetary trade emerges when coordination is problematic, while centralized trade emerges …

Rummaging Through The Attic Of New England, Brieanne Berry, Jennifer Bonnet, Cindy Isenhour

Anthropology Student Scholarship

The concept of the circular economy has taken off, gaining momentum along with concerns about resource depletion, waste, and the impending ‘end of cheap nature’ (Moore 2014). Environmentalists and industrialists alike have promoted the benefits of reuse as a means toward improved efficiency and reduced resource pressure. Some have called for a new ‘culture of reuse’ (Botsman and Rogers 2010; Stokes et al. 2014). It is in this context that we explore repair, resale, and reuse as practices with deep historical precedent and contemporary continuity. Are there lessons to be learned from places that are already home to circular economies …

Product Categories As Judgment Devices: The Moral Awakening Of The Investment Industry, Diane-Laure Arjalies

Business Publications

Product categories are more than classification devices that organize markets; when reflecting market actors' purposes, they are also judgment devices. Taking stock of the literature on product categories and drawing on the distinction between the faculties of knowing and judging, we elaborate a framework that accounts for how and why market actors include or exclude normative attributes in a product category definition. Based on a field study of the development of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) funds in France, we describe the phases and conditions of a judgment framework for category definition, for both established and nascent categories. We discuss implications …

Diversity In Emerging Markets: The Case Of Latin American & The Caribbean, Neleen S. Leslie, Celia Mckoy, Everett Hyatt

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2019

Latin America and the Caribbean encompasses over 40 countries in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Cultural influences in this region include Africa, the native groups, India, as well as the former colonizers from Europe - the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, making it one of the most diverse markets in the world. Country populations within the region are also varied and range from as small as St. Kitts & Nevis with a population of only 52,175 to as large as Brazil with a population of 207,353,391, according to the CIA World Factbook (2017).

Despite lower incomes, the …

Lenders' Roles And Responsibilities In Sovereign Debt Markets, Susan Block-Lieb, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Faculty Scholarship

Academic and policy debates about the multi-trillion-dollar sovereign debt markets presume these markets are unique. The reason is that sovereigns differ from other borrowers. To the extent observers look elsewhere for guidance, they turn to corporate debt as a comparison. For example, official actors have repeatedly intervened in sovereign debt markets by prodding market participants to draft loan contracts that simulate aspects of corporate bankruptcy. We argue that the conventional view of sovereign debt—though useful to a point—has substantially and unjustifiably limited the academic and policy agenda. Rather than dwell on the unique characteristics of sovereign borrowers, we examine the …

Infracompetitive Privacy, Greg Day, Abbey R. Stemler

Scholarly Works

One of the chief anticompetitive effects of modern business lies in antitrust’s blind spot. Platform-based companies (“platforms”) have innovated a business model whereby they offer consumers “free" and low-priced services in exchange for their personal information. With this data, platforms can design products, target consumers, and sell such information to third parties. The problem is that platforms can inflict greater costs on users and markets in the form of lost privacy than efficiencies generated from their low prices. Consumers, as examples, spend billions of dollars annually to remedy privacy breaches and, alarmingly, participate unwittingly in experiments designed to manipulate their …

Marktplatz Zur Koordinierung Und Finanzierung Von Open Source Software, Georg J.P. Link, Malvika Rao, Don Marti, Andy Leak, Rich Bodo

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Open Source ist ein zunehmend beliebter Kollaborationsmechanismus für die Entwicklung von Software, auch in Unternehmen. Unsere Arbeit schafft die fehlende Verbindung zwischen Open Source Projekten, Unternehmen und Märkten. Ohne diese Verbindung wurden Koordinations- und Finanzierungsprobleme sichtbar, die zu schwerwiegenden Sicherheitslücken führen. In diesem Paper entwickeln wir acht Design Features, die ein Marktplatz für Open Source haben sollte, um diese Probleme zu beseitigen. Wir begründen jedes Design Feature mit den bestehenden Praktiken von Open Source und stellen einen Prototypen vor. Abschließend diskutieren wir, welche Auswirkungen die Einführung eines solchen Marktplatzes haben könnte.

Translation: Marketplace to Coordinate and Finance Open Source Software …

On The Fintech Revolution: Interpreting The Forces Of Innovation, Disruption And Transformation In Financial Services, Peter Gomber, Robert J. Kauffman, Chris Parker, Bruce W. Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Firms in the financial services industry have been faced with the dramatic and relatively recentemergence of new technology innovations, and process disruptions. The industry as a whole, and many newfintech start-ups are looking for new pathways to successful business models, the creation of enhanced customerexperience, and new approaches that result in services transformation. Industry and academic observers believethis to be more of a revolution than a set of less impactful changes, with financial services as a whole due formajor improvements in efficiency, in customer centricity and informedness. The long-standing dominance ofleading firms that are not able to figure out how …