contagion

Why Social Distancing Measures Seem Less Effective in the US

Guidelines assume that the less people move around, the less likely they are to be in contact. However, phone location data show...

How to Restart the Economy and Save Lives: Simulations on Northern Italy

Italian officials have to choose the optimal strategy to end the lockdown. A policy that sends all the active population back to...

Covid Economics: During 1918 Influenza, Severe Social Distancing Reduced Negative Impacts on American Economy

ProMarket reviews the most recent and interesting academic papers on the ongoing pandemic: Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner studied how US cities and...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Covid-19 Models, Grocery Stores, and Bank Robberies

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.      Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. Maybe we...

Managing Expectations Is Critical to Ensure Compliance with Stay-at-Home Measures

A study of a representative sample of Italians finds that 50 percent of respondents reported having adopted all recommended actions, including staying at home,...

An Alternative to Complete Shutdown: Let Younger People Work

The mortality rate of Covid-19 is rising with age. The cost of the economic shutdown declines with the number of people not subject to the shutdown. Consequently,...

Testing People and Targeted Isolation: How to Save More Lives (and the American Economy)

Nobel laureate Paul Romer's model shows that if we use a test to determine who gets put into isolation, the fraction of the population...

This Is Not the Time to Be Cautious. We Need to Contain the Economic Contagion of the Coronavirus

The real danger is that the virus mutates and infects our economic system, even as we manage to root it out of our bodies....

Why More Elderly People Get Infected in Some Countries Compared to Others

Italy has a mortality rate of 6 percent while countries like Norway, Denmark, and Germany have rates still close to zero percent. The...

The Fight Against Coronavirus: What the US Can Learn from Italian Hospitals on How to Prevent a Disaster

In a Facebook post that has since become viral, Italian doctor Daniele Macchini offered a first-hand testimony from the Lombardy region, the epicenter of...

LATEST NEWS

A World With Far Fewer Mergers

Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines

A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...

Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market

While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.