Cato Journal最新文献_第2页

Macroprudential Policy, Leverage, and Bailouts 宏观审慎政策、杠杆和救助

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2019-09-01 DOI: 10.36009/CJ.39.3.2

Allan M. Malz

引用次数: 1

How the Supreme Court Promotes Independent Presidential Power 最高法院如何促进总统独立权力

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2019-09-01 DOI: 10.36009/CJ.39.3.10

Louis Fisher

引用次数: 0

Optimal Top Tax Rates: A Review and Critique 最优最高税率:回顾与批判

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2019-09-01 DOI: 10.36009/CJ.39.3.8

Alan Reynolds

引用次数: 2

Zoning Rules! the Economics of Land Use Regulation 分区规则!土地利用调控经济学

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2016-09-22 DOI: 10.5860/choice.193741

Nick Zaiac

{"title":"Zoning Rules! the Economics of Land Use Regulation","authors":"Nick Zaiac","doi":"10.5860/choice.193741","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.193741","url":null,"abstract":"Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation William A. Fischel Cambridge, Mass: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2015, 432 pp. Something has gone terribly wrong in America's cities in the last few decades. Real estate construction has fallen behind demand in cities like New York, San Francisco, Austin, and Miami. Rents are rising, and both current and prospective residents are having a hard time keeping up. The good news is that we know why this is happening. Mainstream economists agree that burdensome restrictions on building new housing in prosperous cities hurt economic growth, exacerbate inequality, and stifle entrepreneurship. The bad news is that it's going to be a huge challenge to fix. This is the lesson that Zoning Rules! teaches us. The book is the magnum opus of Dartmouth economist William Fischel, the follow-up to his acclaimed 1987 book The Economics of Zoning Laws. In the nearly 30 years between these tomes, Fischel spent his career exploring how land use rules came to be and what role they would play in the economy and society. Through careful history, a thorough understanding of property law, and sound economics, Zoning Rules! weaves a story of the rise of the exclusionary zoning laws that have come to strangle housing development in major metropolitan areas. The early years of zoning laws were relatively harmless and mundane compared to what would come later. Urban planners and the officials they appointed generally made pragmatic decisions that reflected the opinions of their constituents. When excluded from one town, developers could find another nearby. Minority factions had trouble blocking development if they lacked political power. It was the era of \"good housekeeping\" zoning. Fischel defines \"good housekeeping\" as basic separation of activities, such as noxious industry from residential areas, without attempts to control or micromanage growth. The period saw a boom in suburban building that would taper off over time. Fischel's theory is that something changed in the 1970s. A confluence of events precipitated the rise of exclusionary laws in the suburbs of the nation's cities. Employment decentralized from areas near ports with the advent of trucking, the interstate system, and the shipping container. Freed from center cities, industry fled to places where land was cheap and plentiful. The period saw housing grow to take up a greater share of household wealth. Combined with the civil rights movement's reforms, the period saw a serious increase in demand for exclusionary housing restrictions. Yet, demand is only part of the story. The supply pressures of exclusionary laws were serious. Unlike labor or capital, moving land from one municipality to another, while not impossible because of processes like municipal annexation, is a serious challenge. With ability to relocate to places with more hospitable legal institutions, weak zoning laws play a key role in the land use decisionmaking process. The period also saw the ","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"725"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89281626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 54

Friedman and the Bernanke-Taylor debate on rules versus constrained discretion 弗里德曼和贝南克-泰勒关于规则与受限自由裁量权的辩论

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2016-03-22 DOI: 10.7892/BORIS.93171

Harris Dellas, G. Tavlas

{"title":"Friedman and the Bernanke-Taylor debate on rules versus constrained discretion","authors":"Harris Dellas, G. Tavlas","doi":"10.7892/BORIS.93171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7892/BORIS.93171","url":null,"abstract":"The debate about rules versus discretion in monetary policy is an old one. It goes back at least to the 1930s, when a group of University of Chicago economists, led by Henry Simons, proposed that the monetary authorities should be bound by a rule that aims to achieve price-level stability.1 Although for many years that debate was confined to the academic community, it spilled over to the public arena in 1958, when Milton Friedman proposed a money-supply growth rule to the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. \u0000Recently, the issue of rules versus discretion in monetary policy has been at the heart of a debate between the former Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, who favors what he calls “cons-trained discretion” in the conduct of monetary policy, and John Taylor, who favors a “rules-based” monetary policy. \u0000In what follows, we address the following question: What would Milton Friedman have thought about the present debate on constrained discretion versus rules-based monetary policy? To shed light on this question, we begin by briefly reviewing the positions of Taylor and Bernanke, respectively, on rules versus discretion. Next, we consider the factors that led Friedman to favor a money-supply growth rule. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Friedman favored using fiscal policy to effectuate changes in the money supply in order to stabilize output at the full-employment level. However, during the 1950s, his growing realization that the Federal Reserve System was culpable in both initiating the Great Depression with its policy tightening in 1928 and 1929 and deepening the Depression \u0000with its policies after 1929, led him to favor a rule that limited discretion. We show that a key factor underlying the rules of both Friedman and Taylor is their common view that monetary policy should aim to reduce uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"23 1","pages":"297-313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85917497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 4

Reflections on the Current State of Political Economy 对政治经济学现状的思考

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2016-01-01 DOI: 10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-0164-2016003

R. Vedder

{"title":"Reflections on the Current State of Political Economy","authors":"R. Vedder","doi":"10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-0164-2016003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-0164-2016003","url":null,"abstract":"Like most economics professors, I have spent my academic lifetime examining the economic and public policy effects of issues involving the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services--political economy, if you will. There is, however, a \"political economy\" to die very act of producing and disseminating economic knowledge and examining public policies. And that political economy and my assessment of it has changed over a career spanning more than half a century. In this brief article, I will confine my attention mostly to the research dimension and look at five issues, most relating to the political economy of the study of political economy. Diminishing Returns to Research I have long been bemused by economists who profess to understand the principle of scarcity and the importance of opportunity costs, yet write so much trivia of little interest to anyone. They do so because of the nonmarket nature of most academic endeavors and the utter lack of incentives to be efficient. The fifteenth paper on a topic is not very likely to add as much to our stock of knowledge as the first or second. I think the nation as a whole has probably overinvested in higher education because of vast governmental subsidies (an argument best made by retired professors like me whose potential acquisition of economic rents by extolling higher education is minimal). That manifests itself in such phenomena as the overeducated Starbucks barista or in the more than 115,000 janitors with bachelor s degrees. It also means roughly 1,000 academic papers are being written on William Shakespeare annually--three per day (Bauerlein 2009: 6). Who reads them? How much does a typical paper add at the margin to the insights that Shakespeare gave us 400 years ago? The problem extends to the inputs as the well as the outputs of higher education, and too many professors are writing too many words (and equations) that, to borrow from the Bard (Shakespeare to college graduates after 1990), \"signify nothing.\" What if professors wrote only one-third or one-half the number of papers they currently write, but taught one more class per year? My guess is that the net effects would be at least mildly positive, maybe even leading to smaller tuition increases and delaying a bit the demise of die current medieval way we do business. Belated to all that, the U.S. Department of Education can probably tell you how many anthropology professors of Hispanic origin there are in South Dakota, but cannot tell you what the average teaching load of American professors is. But I am pretty sure it is minimally 25 percent less than it was when I began fulltime teaching in tire year the Higher Education Act passed, 1965. Doing less (teaching) with more describes modern higher education. Pseudo-Science and Ideology Modern economics may be less ideologically driven dian, say, sociology, but the notion that economists are scientists who objectively observe phenomenon and derive conclusions solely on th","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"56 1","pages":"7-15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76650693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 2

The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer 王朝财富的神话:富人越来越穷

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2015-04-27 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2599827

R. Arnott, William J. Bernstein, Lillian J. Wu

引用次数: 16

Book Review -- Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order 书评——外交政策从国内开始:整顿美国国内秩序的理由

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2014-03-22 DOI: 10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim290020027

Travis Evans

{"title":"Book Review -- Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order","authors":"Travis Evans","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim290020027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim290020027","url":null,"abstract":"Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America's House in Order Richard N. Haass New York: Basic Books, 2013, 208 pp. For the better part of a decade, the United States has been mired in mediocrity, settling for what feels like a new normal of low economic growth, stagnant wages, political intransigence, and an unending war or terror. Many think America's better days are behind it. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, disagrees. In Foreign Policy Begins at Home, Haass attempts to reverse American defeatism and assuage fears of American decline, arguing instead that the United States is simply underperforming, suffering from \"American made\" problems that can be corrected by restoring the \"foundations of its power.\" He explains that America's true strength abroad comes from its strength at home, and if America is to provide global leadership it \"must first put its house in order.\" While much of Foreign Policy focuses on policy prescriptions that would restore American strength, the true contribution of the book is its explanation of why such a strategy is needed. Haass uses the opening chapters to convince readers that American leadership abroad is essential because, to Haass, it is the only option. Only America has the \"capacity, habits, and willingness\" necessary to lead in a nonpolar world in which the \"potential for disorder is considerable.\" Other nations lack the ability, the desire, or both, to do so. While Haass overstates the looming dangers of a nonpolar world, he correctly describes it as a forgiving place from America's perspective. Even after two prolonged \"wars of choice,\" an economic crisis, and poor leadership and mismanagement from Washington, the United States holds considerable advantages over other nations: the strongest military, the largest economy, a stable political system, a commitment to the rule of law, and an abundance of natural resources--to name a few. And when you consider the difficulties facing other nations--the frailty of China's economy and political system, Russia's dependence on petrodollars, Europe's general economic malaise and disjointed structure, Japan's aging population, and India's corruption and lack of critical infrastructure--it is clear that a direct challenge to America is unlikely. Haass is correct, the United States faces no existential threats. The countries often cited as potential rivals to America are more concerned with internal issues, and they currently lack the ability to project power over great distances. Moreover, according to Haass, those countries are dependent on the international system for their own well-being and are therefore \"disinclined to attempt to disrupt an order that serves their national purposes.\" Thus, Haass asserts, America has the space to fix what ails it, and it should take advantage of the opportunity to revamp both its domestic and foreign policy strategies because \"changing just one would be desirable but insufficient.\" ","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"70 1","pages":"438-442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72667793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Gold Standard, the Euro, and the Origins of the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis 金本位、欧元和希腊主权债务危机的起源

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2013-09-22 DOI: 10.7892/BORIS.40290

Harris Dellas, G. Tavlas

{"title":"The Gold Standard, the Euro, and the Origins of the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis","authors":"Harris Dellas, G. Tavlas","doi":"10.7892/BORIS.40290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7892/BORIS.40290","url":null,"abstract":"The planners of a European monetary union would be well advised to study the reasons the pre-World War I gold standard was a successful monetary regime. --Anna J. Schwartz (1993) The entry of Greece into the eurozone in 2001 was widely expected to mark a transformation in the country's economic destiny. During the decade of the 1980s, and for much of the 1990s, the economy had been saddled with double-digit inflation rates, double-digit fiscal deficits (as a percentage of GDP), large current-account imbalances, very low growth rates, and a series of exchange rate crises. Adoption of the euro--the value of which was underpinned by the monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB)--was expected to produce a low-inflation environment, contributing to lower nominal interest rates and longer economic horizons, thereby encouraging private investment and economic growth. The elimination of nominal exchange-rate fluctuations among the former currencies of members of the eurozone was expected to reduce exchange rate uncertainty and risk premia, lowering the costs of servicing the public sector debt, facilitating fiscal adjustment, and freeing resources for other uses. And that is precisely what happened--at least for a while. In the years immediately prior to and immediately after Greece's entry into the eurozone, nominal and real interest rates came down sharply, contributing to high real growth rates. From 2001 through 2008, real GDP rose by an average rate of 3.9 percent per year--the second-highest growth rate (after that of Ireland) in the eurozone. Inflation, which averaged almost 10 percent in the decade prior to eurozone entry, averaged only 3.4 percent over the period 2001-08. Then, beginning in 2009, everything changed as Greece became the center of a major financial crisis. Interest rates on long-term government debt soared from the low single digits prior to the crisis to a peak of 42 percent in early 2012; the country had to resort to two successive adjustment programs (in May 2010 and March 2012) with official international lenders; and the Greek government restructured its debt. Between the end of 2008 and mid-2012, the economy contracted by a cumulative 20 percent (and it continues to contract), and the unemployment rate jumped from less than 8 percent to about 25 percent. Like Odysseus's return trip home from the Trojan War, the road to Ithaca led to a Tartarean hell. What happened? And why did it happen? To answer these questions, we begin by describing the origins of the Greek financial crisis, highlighting the crucial role of growing fiscal and external imbalances. Next, we identify what we believe was a key factor that abetted those imbalances--namely, the absence of an automatic eurozone adjustment mechanism to reduce members' external imbalances. To illustrate our argument, we compare the adjustment mechanism in the eurozone with the adjustment mechanism for the participants of the classical gold-standard regime of the late 19t","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"54 1","pages":"491-520"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78313787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 19

Federal Reserve Policy and the Housing Bubble 美联储政策与房地产泡沫

Cato Journal Pub Date : 2009-01-01 DOI: 10.1002/9781118266588.CH56

Lawrence H. White

{"title":"Federal Reserve Policy and the Housing Bubble","authors":"Lawrence H. White","doi":"10.1002/9781118266588.CH56","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118266588.CH56","url":null,"abstract":"The U.S. housing bubble and the fallout from its bursting are not the results of a laissez-faire monetary and financial system. They happened in an unanchored government fiat monetary system with a restricted financial system. What Happened and Why? Our current financial turmoil began with unusual monetary policy moves by the Federal Reserve System and novel federal regulatory interventions. These poorly chosen public policies distorted interest rates and asset prices, diverted loanable funds into the wrong investments, and twisted normally robust financial institutions into unsustainable positions. There is no doubt that private miscalculation and imprudence have made matters worse for more than a few institutions. Such mistakes help to explain which particular firms have run into the most trouble. But to explain industry-wide errors we need to identify price and incentive distortions capable of having industry-wide effects. Here I will make two main points. First, the Federal Reserve's expansionary monetary policy supplied the means for unsustainable housing prices and unsustainable mortgage financing. Elsewhere (White 2008) I have discussed the growth in regulatory mandates and subsidies that exaggerated the demand for riskier mortgages, most importantly the implicit guarantees to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that combined with HUD's imposition of \"affordable housing\" mandates on Fannie and Freddie to accelerate the creation of a market for securitized subprime mortgages. (1) Second, the Federal Reserve has undertaken self-initiated new lending roles that constitute a shadow bailout program more than twice the size of the Treasury's $700 billion bailout program. There is unfortunately little evidence that the Fed's new lending has helped to resolve our financial problems, rather than to delay their resolution. The Credit Supply Bubble Some authors, considering the relationship of Federal Reserve policy to asset bubbles, ask only: Should the Fed actively burst a growing bubble? If so, how? As posed, their questions suggest that asset bubbles arise independent of monetary policy, and the only Fed role to be discussed is that of bubble-buster. A more important pair of questions is: Does Fed policy as currently conducted tend to inflate assets bubbles? If so, how can we reformulate policy to avoid that tendency? Call our objective a non-bubble-prone or \"non-effervescent\" monetary policy. The economics profession has not reached a consensus on what the optimally non-effervescent monetary policy is, but it is now widely agreed that it isn't holding interest rates too low for too long. It should also now be clear that a Fed policy that deliberately ignores asset prices, as though consumer prices alone were a sufficient indicator of excessive Fed expansion, is also not the way to avoid inflating asset bubbles. In the recession of 2001, the Federal Reserve System under Chairman Alan Greenspan began aggressively expanding the U.S. money supply. Year-over-","PeriodicalId":38832,"journal":{"name":"Cato Journal","volume":"19 1","pages":"115-125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77719333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 66