Volume 12, Issue 2

This paper aims to analyze the final regulations of the Volcker Rule in order to assess any lingering concerns related to the administration of the Rule. Despite the problems criticized by many practitioner and scholars, implementing the Volcker Rule has benefits for banks and the overall economy. First, prohibiting proprietary trading activities may make individual institutions and the banking system as a whole safer. Second, the prohibition on banks’ ownership interest in private equity and hedge funds directly addresses a source of bank default risk – the Volcker Rule limits banks’ exposure to risky private equity and venture capital activities, which are activities that contributed to banks’ probability of default during the 2008 financial crisis. Third, heightened compliance standards and documentation requirements will help improve transparency of banking activities and contribute to bank stability.

Competition is building block of any successful economy, while a cartelized economy is against the common good of society. Nowadays, developing artificial intelligence (AI) and its plausibility to foster cartels persuade governments to revitalize their interference in the market and implement new regulations to tackle AI implications. In this sense, as pooling of technologies might enable cartels to impose high prices and violate consumers’ rights, it should be restricted. By contrast, in the libertarian approach, cartels’ impacts are defined by government interference in the market. Accordingly, it is irrational to rely on a monopolized power called government to equilibrate a cartelized market. This article discusses that AI is a part of the market process that should be respected, and a restrictive or protective approach such as the U.S. government Executive Order 13859 is not in line with libertarian thought and can be a ladder to escalate the cartelistic behaviors.

This study attempts to organize the regulatory perspective on the interaction between information law and competition law, especially for platform businesses. An online platform is an entity that mediates multiple groups of users, such as providers and users of products, services, and information, and has an indirect network effect as a two-sided market. The study illustrates the actions taken by online platforms, indicates attendant problems, and suggests responses to these. Four aspects of the competition policy issues related to online platforms are analyzed and discussed: data collection, data enclosure, data acquisition, and algorithmic transparency. The study considers essential online platform issues, such as promoting competition policy and fairness in information law application, to expand the discussion. Although fairness is important, there is a risk that the analysis of the effects of reducing competition is neglected and that interpreting fairness might increase the concern regarding over-execution. Having disaggregated the elements of fairness, the study suggests the need to establish specific standards.

With the view of marriage as a legal institution to internalize externalities, I examine the effect of marriage on smoking. From analyzing the data of Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I found that unmarried individuals are more likely to smoke by 4.9% point than married individuals with stronger impact on females. The long-run impact of marriage also shows that the unmarried individuals smoke more than married individuals but some of its positive impact diminishes within two years. These results on the whole imply that marriage internalizes the negative externalities of smoking and thus leads smokers to reduce smoking.