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Public Choice Society Call For Papers

The Public Choice Society has issued a Call for Papers for their annual meetings March 10-12, 2016. The plenary speakers include Vernon Smith (Chapman Univ and 2002 economics Nobel laureate), Robert Cooter (UC Berkeley), David Levy (George Mason) and Sandra Peart (Richmond). If you’re not familiar with the Public Choice Society, their purpose statement reads:

The goal of the Society is to facilitate the exchange of research and ideas across disciplines in the social sciences, particularly economics, political science, sociology, law, and related fields. It started when scholars from all these groups became interested in the application of essentially economic methods to problems normally dealt with by political theorists. It has retained strong traces of economic methodology, but new and fruitful directions have developed that transcend the boundaries of any self-contained discipline.The Society meets annually to facilitate scholarly inquiry and exchange of ideas on the range of topics included in non-market decision making.

Paper proposals and early registration begin October 1. Proposals are due by December 1.

TOTM Symposium Honoring Josh Wright

My once-and-future colleague at Truth on the Market, Joshua Wright, resigned this week from the Federal Trade Commission. While a Commissioner, Josh was a voice of economic reason that shaped significant policy decisions and illuminated shortcomings. TOTM is hosting a blogposium this week on the legacy of Josh Wright’s tenure at the FTC, including some significant players in the area of law and economics. It’s definitely worth checking out and following along.

How Federal Student Loans Increase College Costs

A recent paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows how increases in federal student loan programs–intended to make college more affordable–actually increase the cost of college. As with other markets, when the supply of money available to pay tuition increases, the price of tuition rises. The abstract reads:

When students fund their education through loans, changes in student borrowing and tuition are interlinked. Higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply also affects equilibrium tuition costs—for example, by relaxing students’ funding constraints.To resolve this simultaneity problem, we exploit detailed student-level financial data and changes in federal student aid programs to identify the impact of increased student loan funding on tuition. We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong. The subsidized loan effect on tuition is most pronounced for expensive, private institutions that are somewhat, but not among the most, selective.
But the effects don’t stop with rising tuition. This increased demand for college education also exacerbates income inequality by inflating the supply of college graduates. (See this piece by George Leef for a full overview of both the NY Fed paper and the income inequality effects).
It’s not rocket science. It’s pretty simple supply-and-demand stuff, actually. No matter how good the intentions, policies that ignore these effects tend to do more harm than good. In this case, generous federal student loan programs not only lead to increases in tuition that result in even higher loans, but reduce the earning power of graduates (on average) and decrease their ability to repay those loans. A pretty perverse circle of effects indeed.

SCOTUS Rejects USDA’s Raisin Cartel

A couple years ago I posted (here) about a lawsuit progressing through the courts concerning the USDA’s raisin marketing order. The Raisin Administrative Committee (RAC) basically sets a quota on the amount of raisins that can be marketed in a given year as a way of maintaining high-priced raisins. The RAC requires producers to turn a portion of their crop over to the RAC, which then markets the “excess” raisins to other countries or uses.

Today, the US Supreme Court ruled in Horne v. Department of Agriculture that the USDA-sponsored Raisin Administrative Committee’s process amounts to an unconstitutional governmental “taking”. Apparently the decision is limited to the raisin program and it opens the doors to other ways for the USDA to control the raisin market, but the decision also raises questions about the constitutionality of other agricultural commodity programs.

The Editorial Process in Economics and Social Sciences

Marc Bellemare offers some thoughts about the editorial review process in economics and social sciences…from an editors perspective. His insights are helpful for new or younger scholars, and a good reminder for those more seasoned.

On May 1, I will become editor of Food Policy, replacing the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies’ Bhavani Shankar, and sharing the role of editor with the University of Bologna’s Mario Mazzocchi, serving for an initial term of three years.

Given that, I thought now would be as good a time as any to write my thoughts about the editorial process. This will allow me to go back to these thoughts once my term as editor ends, to see what else I might have learned. So here goes–in no particular order–some thoughts I’ve accumulated on the editorial process in the social sciences. I hope others with editorial experience can chime in with their own additional thoughts in the comments.

An Overview of US Food and Nutrition Programs

Hilary Hoynes (Berkley) and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (Northwestern) have a new NBER piece that provides a very useful overview of the four major food and nutrition programs in the U.S., including their histories, current statistics, potential benefits, and the current research on their effectiveness.  An ungated version of the piece is available here.

This chapter provides an overview of the patchwork of U.S. food and nutrition programs, with detailed discussions of SNAP (formerly the Food Stamp Program), WIC, and the school breakfast and lunch programs. Building on Currie’s (2003) review, we document the history and goals of the programs, and describe the current program rules. We also provide program statistics and how participation and costs have changed over time. The programs vary along how “in-kind” the benefits are, and we describe economic frameworks through which each can be analyzed. We then review the recent research on each program, focusing on studies that employ techniques that can isolate causal impacts. We conclude by highlighting gaps in current knowledge and promising areas for future research.

Tesla, Dealer Franchise Laws, and the Politics of Crony Capitalism

About a year ago I posted a couple of pieces (here and here) related to auto dealers’ attempts in various states to shut down Tesla’s direct-to-consumer distribution system. Dan Crane (Michigan Law) has a recent paper on the issue available at SSRN. Below is the abstract:

Tesla Motors is fighting the car dealers’ lobby, aided and abetted by the legacy Detroit manufacturers, on a state by state basis for the right to distribute its innovative electrical automobiles directly to consumers. The Tesla wars showcase the important relationship between product innovation and innovation in distribution methods. Incumbent technologies may block competition by new technologies by creating legal barriers to innovative distribution methods necessary to secure market acceptance of the new technologies. While judicial review of such special interest capture is generally weak in the post-Lochner era, the Tesla wars are creating new alliances in the political struggle against crony capitalism that could contribute to a significant re-telling of the conventional public choice story.