The Unbroken Window

In our daily news e-mail here at the U of R, the lead story this morning was titled, “Physician Calls for More Rigorous Standards for Drugs Up for FDA Approval.” In it, the U of R Med School Dr. O’Connor calls for:
… more stringent Federal guidelines governing the approval of potential new drugs
Among the guidelines [...]

Read Full Post »

Over 20 states have adopted laws requiring youths to wear a helmet
when riding a bicycle.    We confirm previous research indicating that
these laws reduced fatalities and increased helmet use, but we also show that the laws significantly reduced youth bicycling.  We find this result in standard two-way fixed effects models of parental reports of youth bicycling, [...]

Read Full Post »

This paper quantifies the scale and scope of the commercial real estate mortgage bond market … in an attempt to better understand the role of retail mortgage debt. In particular, this paper quantifies the size of the market, identifies risk factors affecting the coupon yield spread over Treasuries and utilizes a unique data set to [...]

Read Full Post »

Recently the blogosphere was awash in pointing out right-wing pundits who did not believe there was a housing bubble. I find that completely uninteresting and uninformative – but if that floats your ideological boat then happy sailing to you. Here is something I find more interesting – the author of the leading Money and Banking [...]

Read Full Post »

So you think the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act guarantee that the air and water are cleaned?
One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During [...]

Read Full Post »

In this edition of Progressive Corporatism in Many Lessons:
But as the business grew, so did its troubles. Hundreds of new bike operators arrived, pestering tourists and testing the city’s tolerance. Pedicab owners, alarmed at lax safety standards, began a push for regulation — an effort that stretched for years, encompassing a rare mayoral veto in [...]

Read Full Post »

As opposed to using pricing mechanisms to achieve goals is no better illustrated than in this pathetic excuse for a law:
“Power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators Wednesday adopted a first-in-the-nation mandate to reduce electricity demand.”
Let’s see …we want consumers to reduce electricity use, so rather than raising the [...]

Read Full Post »

Form a blue ribbon commission to increase regulations and recommend other solutions to “fix” that struggling industry. I have an exam and a quiz to write right now, but this article is a goldmine of economic stupidity. Par for the course these days.
Two lowlights:
Airlines are offering the fewest seats to passengers, measured by available seats [...]

Read Full Post »

Perhaps no article better illustrates what happens in a modern progressive corporate state.
Two highlights (lowlights):
But now he and others like him — makers of small toys and owners of toy resale shops and boutique stores — say their livelihood is being threatened by federal legislation enacted in the last year to protect children from toxic [...]

Read Full Post »

From Warren Meyer:

Brad Warbiany has a great suggestion in response to new FTC rules requiring that
Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally [...]

Read Full Post »