Law Commons^™

Price Gouging In A Pandemic, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging” — a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages.

This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price …

Incarceration And The Economic Fortunes Of Urban Neighborhoods, Jeffrey A. Fagan, Valerie West

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter turns to the response of the criminal justice system to neighborhood violence, in particular examining to what extent persistently high levels of incarceration can depress economic well-being and human capital in disadvantaged and racially segregated communities. A panel analysis of New York City neighborhoods between 1985 and 1996, a period in which the city's violent-crime rates both rose and fell sharply, provides evidence that high incarceration rates reduce income growth, educational attainment, and work experience in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods. To rectify this, targeted micro investment and housing development in such areas can break the connection between …

The Promise (And Limits) Of Neuroeconomics, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Neuroeconomics — the study of brain activity in people engaged in tasks of reasoning and choice — looks set to be the next behavioral economics: a set of findings about how people make decisions that casts both light and doubt on widely accepted premises about rationality and social life. This Article explains what is most exciting about the new field and lays out some specific research tasks for it.