Economics Commons^™

Labor Unions: A Corporatist Institution In A Competitive World, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

Union membership, as a percentage of the private sector workforce, has been in decline for 50 years. I argue that the cause of this unrelenting decline is a single, fundamental factor – the change in the United States economy from a corporatist-regulated economy to one based on free competition. Most labor commentators have explained the decline by a confluence of unrelated economic and legal forces. Labor economists typically stress economic explanations, which vary from compositional shifts in the job structure to increased competition both domestically and internationally. On the other hand, labor law commentators naturally focus on labor law explanations, …

Fiduciary Duties And The Analyst Scandals, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Criminalization Of Corporate Law: The Impact On Shareholders And Other Constituents, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Does Analyst Independence Sell Investors Short?, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

Regulators responded to the analyst scandals of the late 1990s by imposing extensive new rules on the research industry. These rules include a requirement forcing financial firms to separate investment banking operations from research. Regulators argued, with questionable empirical support, that the reforms were necessary to eliminate analyst conflicts of interest and ensure the integrity of sell-side research.

By eliminating investment banking revenues as a source for funding research, the reforms have had substantial effects. Research coverage of small issuers has been dramatically reduced—the vast majority of small capitalization firms now have no coverage at all. The market for research …

Reasonable Emissions Of Greenhouse Gases: Efficient Abatement For A Stock Pollutant, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Copyright And Public Good Economics: A Misunderstood Relation, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The conventional approach to analyzing the economics of copyright is based on the premise that copyrightable works constitute pure public goods, which is generally modeled by assuming that such works are non-excludable and that the marginal cost of making additional copies of them is essentially zero. These assumptions in turn imply that markets systematically produce too few copyrightable works and underutilize those that are produced. Moreover, any attempt to alleviate the problems of underproduction necessarily exacerbates the problems of underutilization and vice versa. In this Article, Professor Christopher Yoo argues that the conventional approach is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. …

Private Standards, Public Governance: A New Look At The Financial Accounting Standards Board, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (the “FASB”) presents a puzzle: How has this private standard setter managed simultaneously (1) to remain independent, (2) to achieve institutional stability and legitimacy, and (3) to operate in a politicized context in the teeth of op-position from its own constituents? This Article looks to governance design to account for this institutional success. The FASB’s founders made a strategic choice to create a regulatory agency that sought independence rather than political responsiveness. The FASB also set out a coherent theory of accounting, the “Conceptual Framework,” to contain and direct its decisions. The Conceptual Framework contributed …

Restraints On Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Beginning with the work of Joseph Schumpeter in the 1940s and later elaborated by Robert W. Solow's work on the neoclassical growth model, economics has produced a strong consensus that the economic gains from innovation dwarf those to be had from capital accumulation and increased price competition. An important but sometimes overlooked corollary is that restraints on innovation can do far more harm to the economy than restraints on traditional output or pricing. Many practices that violate the antitrust laws are best understood as restraints on innovation rather than restraints on pricing.

While antitrust models for assessing losses that result …

Jumpstart Inc: Economic Impact On Northeast Ohio, Ziona Austrian

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This research note estimates the economic impact resulting from JumpStart Inc. investment in start-up companies in Northeast Ohio. JumpStart is a business development organization or, more specifically a venture-development organization that funds high-growth businesses and ideas, works with their founders to develop the businesses into venture-ready entities, and celebrates Northeast Ohio's early-stage company successes.

Book Review: Social Justice: The Moral Foundations Of Public Health And Health Policy, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a review of Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy by Madison Powers & Ruth Faden (2006).

In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate? In a world filled with inequalities in health and well-being, which inequalities matter most and are the most morally urgent to address? In order to answer these questions, Powers and Faden develop a unique theory of social justice that, while developed for the specific contexts of public health and health …

The Flood: Political Economy And Disaster, Mari J. Matsuda

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As summer faded to fall in 2005, a hurricane hit New Orleans, a city so unique in its history that it has more history than many American cities. It was nonetheless an American city in these telling parameters: a city of luxury alongside squalor, two-thirds Black, one-fourth poor, with the gap between its rich and poor growing at a gallop as the waters of lake and river lapped gently along aging, grass-covered levees.

Freeze the frame before the waters rise, and what do you see? A devastated public school system, where Black children are labeled “failing,” along with their schools. …

Mandating Access To Telecom And The Internet: The Hidden Side Of Trinko, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust has long played a major role in telecommunications policy, demonstrated most dramatically by the equal access mandate imposed during the breakup of AT&T. In this Article we explore the extent to which antitrust can continue to serve as a source of access mandates following the Supreme Court's 2004 Trinko decision. Although Trinko sharply criticized access remedies and antitrust courts' ability to enforce them, it is not yet clear whether future courts will interpret the opinion as barring all antitrust access claims. Even more importantly, the opinion contains language hinting at possible bases for differentiating among different types of access, …

Keeping The Internet Neutral?: Tim Wu And Christopher Yoo Debate, Tim Wu, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

"Net neutrality" has been among the leading issues of telecommunications policy this decade. Is the neutrality of the Internet fundamental to its success, and worth regulating to protect, or simply a technical design subject to improvement? In this debate-form commentary, Tim Wu and Christopher Yoo make clear the connection between net neutrality and broader issues of national telecommunications policy.

Hedge Funds And Governance Targets, William W. Bratton

All Faculty Scholarship

Corporate governance interventions by hedge fund shareholders are triggering debates between advocates of management empowerment and advocates of aggressive monitoring by actors in the capital markets. This Article intervenes with an empirical question: What, based on the record so far, have the hedge funds actually done to their targets? Information has been collected on 130 domestic firms identified in the business press since 2002 as targets of activist hedge funds, including the funds’ demands, their tactics, and the results of their interventions for the targets’ governance and finance. The survey results show that the hedge funds have an enviable record …

Agrarian Scenario In Post-Reform India: A Story Of Distress, Despair And Death, Srijit Mishra

Srijit Mishra

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer household’s returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The incomes are inadequate and the farmer is not in a position to address the multitude of risks: weather, credit, market and technology among others. Social responsibility of education, healthcare and marriage instead of being normal activities add to the burden. All these would even put the semi-medium farmer under a state of transient poverty. The state of the vast majority of small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers is worse off. An extreme form of response …

Innovation And Productivity In European Industries, Mario Pianta, Andrea Vaona

Mario Pianta

The labour productivity impact of innovation is investigated in this paper combining neo-Schumpeterian insights on the variety of innovation with the importance of industrial structures and firm size; two models are proposed for explaining productivity and export success in European manufacturing industries and firm-size classes. The empirical estimates are based on data from the European innovation survey (CIS 2), covering Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK, broken down by 22 sectors and for large, medium, and small firms. The econometric results, obtained adopting cross-sectional estimation methodologies able to account for unobserved industrial characteristics, show that productivity in Europe …

Innovazione E Occupazione, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta

No abstract provided.

Demand And Innovation In European Industries, Mario Pianta, Francesco Crespi

Mario Pianta

After the decade-old debate between demand-pull and technology-push perspectives, demand seems to have fallen out of fashion. In this paper two models are proposed on the determinants of general innovative activities and on the market impact of product innovations. The models combine the supply and demand engines of innovation, and qualify the type of innovative efforts, distinguishing between those oriented towards cost reductions or towards technological competitiveness. The models are tested at the industry level for 22 manufacturing sectors and 17 services sectors in six European countries. The results show that efforts at technological competitiveness, product oriented strategies and the …

Commercio Con L'Estero E Tecnologia In Italia Negli Anni Cinquanta E Sessanta, Mario Pianta, Matteo Gamellini

Mario Pianta

Il commercio con l’estero ha svolto un ruolo centrale nello sviluppo economico italiano del secondo dopoguerra. Il rapido aumento dell’export ha contribuito all’accelerazione dei tassi di crescita dell’economia, ha stimolato le attività tecnologiche, ha disegnato l’orientamento della struttura produttiva italiana e la sua collocazione sui mercati europei e internazionali. La crescita impetuosa delle importazioni ha permesso l’acquisizione dall’estero di conoscenze e beni essenziali per il paese. Negli anni Cinquanta e Sessanta l’Italia assume le caratteristiche di un’economia aperta, segnata dall’importanza della domanda estera e della competitività internazionale: si delineano in questo periodo aspetti destinati a diventare una caratteristica permanente dell’economia …

Industria, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta

Le trasformazioni dell'economia hanno al centro il ruolo dell'industria, che nei primi anni del 21° secolo è stata caratterizzata da processi di innovazione tecnologica, di internazionalizzazione della produzione e di diffusione delle attività industriali in numerosi Paesi in via di sviluppo. Nei Paesi più avanzati e in Italia tali processi hanno portato a una concentrazione del controllo di produzioni svolte su scala internazionale, a una forte crescita delle attività finanziarie, a una progressiva deindustrializzazione, con il calo dell'occupazione nel settore e la crescita del peso dei servizi.

Global Justice Movements. The Transnational Dimension, Mario Pianta, Raffaele Marchetti

Mario Pianta

No abstract provided.

Comercio Y Trabajo: Asimetrias En El Gobierno Global, Mario Pianta

Mario Pianta

No abstract provided.