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4611. Decisionmaking, Risk, and Uncertainty: An Analysis of Climate Change Policy

Author:
Kruti Dholakia-Lehenbauer and Euel W. Elliott
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
This article explores four questions. First, what theoretical frameworks help describe policy failure and success? Second, how might the decision that leads to failure or success be understood in terms of differing concepts of rationality and decisionmaking? Third, how does the discussion of risk and uncertainty as originally proposed by Frank Knight (1921) apply to a better understanding of both the first and second questions? Fourth, what is the relationship between serial and parallel processing and how are these administrative systems related to important aspects of the prior questions? Our chief contribution in this article is to show the ways in which these questions and their respective theoretical frameworks are interrelated as applied to one important contemporary policy question-climate change. We think our proposed integration of the various literatures offers important insights into the challenges policymakers face in deciding whether or not to adopt a particular policy.
Political Geography:
United States

4612. School Choice and Achievement: The Ohio Charter School Experience

Author:
Nathan L. Gray
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
K–12 education policy has recently received much scrutiny from policymakers, taxpayers, parents, and students. Reformers have often cited increases in spending with little noticeable gain in test scores, coupled with the fact that American students lag behind their foreign peers on standardized tests, as the policy problem. School choice, specifically charter school policy, has emerged as a potential remedy. School choice is hypothesized to have both participant and systemic (sometimes called competitive) effects. This article concentrates on the latter by using a novel design not used before in studies of this subject. School level data from Ohio are analyzed to estimate if traditional public schools potentially threatened by charter schools respond with positive test score gains. Specifically, an exogenous change to the education system in 2003 provides a natural experiment to examine potential systemic effects. Results indicate that the threat of charter schools seems to have had a small positive effect on traditional public school achievement.
Political Geography:
America

4613. The New Monetary Economics Revisited

Author:
David Cronin
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
This article revisits the key conceptual aspects of the New Monetary Economics (NME) by examining the idea of “monetary separation” and objections raised against it. So long as a dominant role for base money in exchange exists, using it to provide the unit of account remains advantageous and is likely to outweigh any mooted benefits of separation. Recent quantitative analysis, however, shows the transaction demand for government base money to be falling, a development that can be expected to continue in the years ahead. The passage of time thus seems to be weakening the principal basis on which monetary separation has been criticized—namely, the superiority of base money in payments. That development fits into the history of money told by Austrian economists, which emphasises payment practices evolving over time in response to technological improvements and market forces.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Europe, Germany, Cyprus, and Luxembourg

4614. Starving the Beast Revisited

Author:
Masoud Moghaddam
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The determinants of government budget deficits have been studied extensively, especially during the years in which the discrepancy between federal income taxes and expenditures has widened. In that respect, it is of interest to explore the causal relationship between government revenues and expenditures. If the direction of causation is from taxes to spending, then enjoying tax cuts without cutting expenditures necessitates starving the beast, as suggested by Milton Friedman (1978) and confirmed by a number of studies including Garcia and Henin (1999), and Chang, Liu, and Caudill (2002). On the other hand, if a tax cut is perceived by rational agents to be a cut in the cost of public goods, then spending would increase. In that case, taxes and spending are inversely related. Support for that relationship—the so-called fiscal illusion hypothesis—is provided by Wagner (1976), Niskanen (1978, 2002, 2006), and more recently by New (2009) and Young (2009). There are also a few studies in which no significant causal relation between tax and spend variables has been reported (e.g., Baghestani and McNown (1994).
Topic:
Government

4615. The Behavior of the Labor Market between Schechter (1935) and Jones Laughlin (1937)

Author:
Todd C. Neumann, Jason E. Taylor, and Jerry L. Taylor
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
Recent research on the Great Depression emphasizes the role New Deal economic policy played in slowing recovery. Policies promoting cartels and higher wage rates during a time that the economy was experiencing unprecedented unemployment were likely to have created a negative supply shock that exacerbated economic depression rather than helped to alleviate it. Still, for 22 months between two important Supreme Court rulings, labor and product markets were relatively free of intervention. In A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (May 1935), the Court ruled that the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) was unconstitutional. In addition to setting up industry cartels, the NIRA had imposed relatively high minimum hourly wage rates and restrictions on work- weeks and required firms to recognize the right of labor to organize.
Topic:
International Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States

4616. The Scope of Government in a Free Society

Author:
James A. Dorn
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
The purpose of this article is to delineate the legitimate functions of government in a free society. This exercise differs from determining the “optimal” size of government, which economists have estimated at 15 to 30 percent of gross domestic product. James Madison, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution, was not primarily looking for an engine of economic growth; he was seeking an institutional design to limit the powers of government and protect individual rights. People would then be free to pursue their happiness and, in the process, create wealth.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
United States

4617. The Money Trap: Escaping the Grip of Global Finance

Author:
Judy Shelton
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
To read Robert Pringle's new book, The Money Trap, is to experience the slow joy of recognizing that someone out there in the world of intellectual propriety and academic correctness is willing to state the case that the global financial crisis can be traced in large part to the lack of an orderly international monetary system.

4618. The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and the Quest to Ban the Bomb

Author:
Matt Fay
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
Can four former Cold War policymakers and a prominent physicist of the era change the world through sheer force of personality? Former New York Times columnist Philip Taubman certainly thinks so, and in his new book he attempts to be the first to tell their story. The Partnership is the chronicle of how George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sidney Drell decided to take up the cause of nuclear abolition.
Topic:
Cold War and Nuclear Weapons

4619. Stochastic Optimal Control and the U.S. Financial Debt Crisis

Author:
Peter Clark
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
At one point during the recent financial crisis the queen of England reportedly asked economists at the London School of Economics a seemingly straightforward question: “Why did academic economists fail to foresee the crisis?” This question can be broadened to include central banks, the International Monetary Fund, and technical specialists on Wall Street (“quants”). Jerome L. Stein, professor of economics (emeritus) and research professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, has written a timely book that provides a cogent and convincing answer to this question.
Political Geography:
United States

4620. Sustaining China's Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis

Author:
James A. Dorn
Publication Date:
10-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
The Cato Journal
Institution:
The Cato Institute
Abstract:
As one of the world's leading experts on China's economic reforms, Nick Lardy has produced two earlier books that have become keys to understanding the challenges China faces in making the transition to a market economy and becoming a full-pledged member of the global liberal economic order. His 1998 volume on China's Unfinished Economic Revolution and his 2002 text on Integrating China into the Global Economy were both published by the Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow from 1995 until 2003, at which time he joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is now Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow.
Political Geography:
China