Rent Check California Governor Gavin Newsom is playing hardball with NIMBY municipalities by threatening to withhold state revenue for municipalities that fail to meet their housing goals. News and [...]
Rent Check Ohio leads the nation in occupational licensing reform. The most groundbreaking part of HB 255? Mandatory review of licensing boards every six years, which would require they be [...]
The Disney Corporation is a notoriously litigious firm, with most of their lawsuits based on copyright infringement. (In their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David Levine entitle one [...]
Rent Check How restrictions on access to the Fed's discount window in the 1930s led banks to de-risk their portfolios, creating a subsequent bank run. News and Commentary Growing corporate [...]
Preemption of local zoning regulations by state governments is a good solution to the housing affordability crisis because it prevents neighborhood NIMBYs from setting restrictive zoning codes that hamper development. [...]
Banking crises follow a similar pattern throughout history. Banks make leveraged investments in the form of loans to businesses or individuals (in the latter case, usually homeowners), the borrowers are [...]
One of the main troubles with our current healthcare system is the overuse of emergency rooms to address non-emergency health problems. The CDC found that in 2015, of the nearly [...]
Rent Check New NBER research on the effectiveness of patents in incentivizing innovation. The case for patenting is strong in the case of pharmaceuticals, but other industries engage in patenting [...]
Elsevier, the publishing company that holds the copyright to thousands of journals that publish hundreds of thousands of articles annually, is one of the most notorious copyright rent-seekers in existence. [...]
The rule of thumb for when an intellectual monopoly should be granted is if, absent monopoly power, a given innovation would not come into existence. This is generally true in [...]