This Week in Intellectual Property, August 12th
News and Commentary July's entry in EFF's "Stupid Patent of the Month" series is up! This particular stupid patent is owned by Anuwave LLC, and it covers technology that allows [...]
This Week in Land-Use Regulation, August 8th
News and Commentary In Denver, a neighborhood group is attempting to preserve an eccentrically designed local restaurant. In doing so, they would prevent the owner from selling the establishment and [...]
This Week in Occupational Licensing, August 7th
News and Commentary What do Andrew Yang, Ivanka Trump, and Obama's economists all have in common? Other than a passion for mathematics, they all oppose excessive occupational licensing. An article [...]
This Week in Financial Regulation, August 6th
Rent Check Dan Takash has a new post critiquing the regulatory treatment of Contingent Convertible bonds. CoCos function like normal debt until the borrower becomes financially distressed, then the loan [...]
CoCos vs. Comprehensive Regulatory Reform
We’ve previously written about Contingent Convertible (CoCo) bonds as an alternative to traditional debt and a tool to increase financial stability. CoCos are instruments that, while essentially the same as [...]
This Week in Intellectual Property, August 5th
Rent Check This blog post details the profits earned by 2019's top movies. The worldwide box office totals alone have earned the films (all owned by Disney) fantastical returns, demonstrating how [...]
This Week in Land-Use Regulation, August 1st
Rent Check John Hunt has an analysis of New York's latest package of tenant protections. The inclusionary zoning provisions, while a potential way to mitigate the (relatively) high price of [...]
This Week in Occupational Licensing, July 31st
Rent Check Today would have been Milton Friedman's 107th birthday. One year ago, Dan wrote a post outlining Friedman's critiques of occupational licensing; the argument is as timely today as [...]
Disney’s Unbelievably Sky-High Box Office Returns
Rents, in the economic sense, are above-normal profits that are usually attributed to some unfair market structure, often made possible through regressive regulations. In the case of copyright, there is [...]
This Week in Financial Regulation, July 30th
Rent Check I have a blog post examining how the Community Reinvestment Act is inadvertently accelerating gentrification. While it was a needed amelioration for the legacies of redlining, flaws in [...]