This Week in Occupational Licensing, May 23rd
News and Commentary A federal judge has found Savannah, Georgia's law against unlicensed tour guides to be a violation of the First Amendment. The suit was brought by the Institute [...]
This Week in Financial Regulation, May 22nd
News and Commentary Despite levying fines of over $20 billion in the past five years, the SEC has only collected about 55% of the amount owed. This discrepancy is largely [...]
Time to buy or just buying time? Lessons from October 2008 for the cross-border bailout of banks
This paper studies the country-level reaction of bank credit default swap (“CDS”) spreads and stock prices to bailout announcements in the US and five European countries in October 2008. Bailouts [...]
Banking crises and crisis dating: Disentangling shocks and policy responses
We construct theory-based measures of systemic bank shocks. These measures complement banking crisis indicators employed in many empirical studies, which we show capture (lagged) policy responses to systemic bank shocks. [...]
Measuring contagion risk in international banking
We propose a distress measure for national banking systems that incorporates not only banks’ CDS spreads, but also how they interact with the rest of the global financial system via [...]
This Week in Intellectual Property, May 21st
Rent Check A lawsuit between the creator of the Pepe the frog meme and the far-right website infowars for use of the frog's likeness creates some open questions on the [...]
Alt Right vs Copyright
Pepe the Frog has gone from a relatively obscure cartoon character to an icon of the alt right. The use of Pepe’s likeness in a poster for sale on the [...]
This Week in Land-Use Regulation, May 16th
News and Commentary SB 50 has been postponed until January 2020. The bill was postponed and will likely undergo revisions, after fierce opposition from neighborhood supervisors and other local groups. [...]
Affordable Housing and City Welfare
Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy [...]
The rise and effects of homeowners associations
In the U.S., nearly 60% of recently built single-family houses, and 80% of houses in new subdivisions, are part of a homeowners association (HOA). We construct the first near-national map [...]