Volume 3, Issue 8

Harry Saunders argues that we owe it to the public, as well as to the economics profession, to be realistic about the level of pain required to combat global warming.

Nick Wills-Johnson wonders whether social network and graph theory could help in valuing ecosystem services.

J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin's July, 2006 article gave several good reasons why "informed and aggressive" investors will not necessarily push prices all of the way to their fundamental levels, but missing was the fact that there may not be enough such investors given that none will rationally choose to be too aggressive and have too undiversified a portfolio, according to Richard Serlin.

John Donohue wonders if the Disney case means that the courts of Delaware will cleverly find the facts they need to allow managers to waste corporate assets however they please.

The Clean Air Act requires "New Source Review" -- the installation of specific state-of-the-art pollution control equipment when and only when a new polluting plant is constructed, or a "modification" is undertaken on an existing plant. Shi-Ling Hsu argues that this "grandfathering" policy slows the replacement of old plants with new, more efficient, and less polluting ones.

James K. Galbraith and Travis Hale argue that the IT bust and the subsequent fall in the NASDAQ led toward a convergence of income across American counties; yet amidst this movement toward greater equality, several counties have gone from rich to richer mainly due to increased government spending under the Bush administration.

Despite the insider trading laws and Sarbanes-Oxley, Jesse Fried argues that executives still make billions of dollars of insider trading profits each year by timing their stock sales: requiring advance disclosure of such trades would go far to address this problem.