Regulation

News media circulates with warnings about speculative bubbles in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, but history shows that not all bubbles are bad for the economy, and some may even aid long-term growth. In new research, Jared Bernstein, Aneil Kovvali and Jeffery Y. Zhang distinguish between constructive and destructive bubbles and suggest how the government and financial institutions can limit the consequences of the latter.

Shishene Jing argues that the fair use doctrine's central question—whether a use is sufficiently transformative to avoid licensing requirements—breaks down when applied to AI. Transformativeness worked as a test because transformative uses rarely competed financially with the originals. AI training severs that relationship, as it is both the most transformative use of copyrighted material and the use best equipped to displace their markets.

For its entire 15-year life as a regional bank, SVB held the same risky bet. The risks were visible the whole time, yet supervisors reacted only once losses had materialized. SVB's collapse is less a story of hidden danger than of a supervisory system that polices process rather than risk.

Chilean authorities are testing an unofficial “independence rule” that forbids digital platforms from exerting further influence over how business users set their own prices through most-favored-nation clauses. Manuel Abarca Meza assesses how this rule could potentially fit into antitrust case law and whether or not it effectively weighs the risks against market efficiencies.

In new research, evidence from a land titling campaign in the Democratic Republic of Congo shows that formal property rights can do more than secure land: they can give citizens an exit from costly informal obligations, writes Pablo Balán.

In a new paper, Joseph Emmens, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, Stefano Manfredonia, Felix Noth, and Tommaso Santini find that when competitors for the same pool of workers share investors, they increase their innovation to automate tasks and slow down hiring.    

The revived American Innovation Choice Online Act singles out a handful of Big Tech giants for unique, antitrust-like restrictions, but without the standard methodological...

The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter strips independent agencies of removal protections that made regulatory policy predictable across administrations. In new research, Brian Feinstein and Daniel Hemel find that equity markets assign real value to precisely that kind of insulation.

In new research examining 44 million U.S. mortgages and nearly 5,000 bank mergers over three decades, Celso Brunetti, Jeffrey H. Harris, and Ioannis Spyridopoulos find that bank consolidation does not raise mortgage rates, restrict credit access, or degrade loan quality. Local mortgage markets remain intensely competitive. 

California’s proposed wealth tax on billionaires will struggle to accurately value and tax the wealth of California’s richest. Rather than fund the state’s massive budgetary commitments, the bill may drive away its largest taxpayers, write Ray Ball and Andrew Sutherland.