The underlying premise of the Administration’s decision is that the federal government has the right to force people to give away the products and services they produce. If the government can force insurance companies to “give away” health care coverage to avoid a political embarrassment, what is to prevent the government from requiring other companies or industries to give away their products if such a mandate would be politically expedient? And more importantly, does Mr Obama really believe any company is going to simply write-off the cost of the “free” service and not cover it by raising the cost of other services? In essence, insurance companies will have incentive simply to raise the price of the health plans they offer to exemption-qualifying employers. Either way, the employer will pay for it. It just might not be listed on the receipt.

Or perhaps Mr. Obama plans to make the cost of the “free” contraceptive care a qualifying charitable contribution for health insurers, since it will only apply to non-profits.

What makes the proposed solution even more ludicrous is that health insurance companies neither manufacture nor deliver, in most cases, contraceptive pills. So why should insurance companies even be involved in this great giveaway? A more direct solution would be to require pharmaceutical manufacturers to give the pills away to begin with. Or to require pharmacies to distribute them for free to qualifying individuals.

Regardless of where one stands on women’s reproductive rights, women’s health or religious liberty, we all make our living by getting paid for what we do. The President’s mandate attempts to create something from nothing by forcing insurers to provide services without getting paid for them. That should violate the sensibilities of anyone who works for their pay.

If legislators disagree about the efficacy of a proposed policy, why not resolve the disagreement with a bet?  One approach would be to impose one policy approach randomly on some members of the population, but not on others, to determine whether the policy meets its goals. This solution would overcome the measurement problems of conventional regression analysis and would provide a useful way to compare regulations and promote bipartisan agreement. Legislators might agree that once such a test is complete, the winning approach would apply to everyone.

For example, regulators could test the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s most controversial provisions, such as those requiring public companies to institute internal controls and then to have their CEOs and CFOs certify their financial statements, by randomly repealing one or more of those provisions for some corporations for some period of time. Randomization would enable analysts to determine which regulatory regime is optimal by assessing which test-group of corporations has the highest level of success, whether measured by stock price, investor confidence in financial reporting, lack of fraud, or other yardsticks.

Conventional statistical and econometric analytical techniques are often used to measure the efficacy of statutes and regulations, but they face problems that randomized trials would not. Researchers may purposefully or mistakenly omit variables from their regression analyses, leading to incorrect results. Publishers are more likely to feature work that provides statistically significant results, even if those results are not correct, a phenomenon known as publication bias.

No doubt many economists and empiricists are nodding their heads in agreement and drooling at the opportunity to more accurately identify and measure the effects of regulation.  Randomization would allow application of techniques far superior to what is typically used.  AAY discuss some of the common critiques of randomization in the blog post, and at greater length in the paper.  The longer version is worth reading, but here is the short version from the blog post:

Ethical concerns are important, but may not present a significant barrier to using randomized tests. While legal randomized tests would lack the informed consent provided in medical experiments, the government regularly imposes regulations on the public – within constitutional and other legal bounds. Also, randomization sometimes makes the imposition more equal than regulation imposed using predetermined criteria. We tend to think it is worse to impose rules on people because the selected people are unpopular rather than simply because they were selected randomly.

How should randomized trials work? The experiments should be large enough to produce meaningful results. The test groups, meanwhile, should be the smallest possible without changing the results outside those test groups. For example, driving speed limits cannot be randomized at the individual level because such a test group size would significantly increase the risk of accidents. However, the test group could be at the county level.

Experiments should also be of sufficiently long durations to prevent test subjects from changing their behavior temporarily for the duration of the experiment. For example, if different income tax levels are imposed on different people to see if imposing a higher income tax reduces work output, an experiment of short duration would be more likely to be biased. Workers could wait out a temporary increase in income tax level by temporarily working less, and plan to work more once their income tax level decreases.

There is no problem, under current standards of judicial review, with administrative agencies testing out different regulations on their own. Agencies could put their proposed experimental regulations through the regular notice and comment process. After running the experiment, the agencies could provide a randomization impact statement explaining why the agency decided to test regulations through that process, describing the experiment, and providing its results. Because randomization provides for more objective analysis of policy results, courts should be more deferential in conducting hard look review to agencies that have selected policies through this approach.

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim that it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true.  Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form.  But the millions of American women who choose to use contraception should not be forced to follow religious doctrine, whether Catholic or non-Catholic.

The three Senators seem to believe that as long as the government doesn’t force Catholic women to use birth control and the morning after pill, religious liberty is protected.  They also believe that in praying to the Almighty One (not that Almighty One) for permission not to pay for a medical intervention that offends their deeply and sincerely held religious beliefs, Catholic officials are trying to force women to follow their religious doctrine.

That’s ridiculous, and it shows how desperate the defenders of President Obama’s intrusion on individual conscience have become.  In a world in which religious employers were exempt from paying for a measure that violates their sacred beliefs, any woman who didn’t share those beliefs would be perfectly free to obtain birth control.  The Catholic Church, after all, doesn’t have the power to overrule Griswold v. Connecticut.

By contrast, in the world of Mr. Obama’s contraception mandate, Catholic officials who choose to follow their consciences by refusing to subsidize interventions that violate their religious beliefs may ultimately be thrown in jail.  That, Honorable Senators, is a full-frontal assault on religious liberty.

[More on the deeply misguided contraception mandate here.]

The article shows that time-consistent, imperfectly targeted support to distressed institutions makes private leverage choices strategic complements. When everyone engages in maturity mismatch, authorities have little choice but intervening, creating both current and deferred (sowing the seeds of the next crisis) social costs. In turn, it is profitable to adopt a risky balance sheet. These insights have important consequences, from banks choosing to correlate their risk exposures to the need for macro-prudential supervision.

Nature News (via Bronwyn Hall):

One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published today in Science, also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce.

I think reference bloat is a problem, particularly in management journals (not so much in economics journals). Too many papers include tedious lists of references supporting even trivial or obvious points. It’s a bit like blog entries that ritually link every technical term or proper noun to its corresponding wikipedia entry. “Firms seek to position themselves and acquire resources to achieve competitive advantage (Porter, 1980; Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1986).” Unless the reference is non-obvious, narrowly linked to a specific argument, etc., why include it? Readers can do their Google Scholar searches if needed.

In management this strikes me as a cultural issue, not necessarily the result of editors or reviewers wanting to build up their own citation counts. But I’d be curious to hear about reader’s experiences, either as authors or (confession time!) editors or reviewers.

With all due respect to management journals for requiring citations for authority that water runs downhill, demand curves slope downward and so forth, I’ve got my money on the law reviews.

In the context of U.S. antitrust law, many commentators have recently called for an expansion of the Federal Trade Commission’s adjudicatory decision-making authority pursuant to Section 5 of the FTC Act, increased rulemaking, and carving out exceptions for the agency from increased burdens of production facing private plaintiffs. These claims are often expressly grounded in the assertion that expert agencies generate higher quality decisions than federal district court judges. We call this assertion the expertise hypothesis and attempt to test it. The relevant question is whether the expert inputs available to generalist federal district court judges translate to higher quality outputs and better performance than the Commission produces in its role as an adjudicatory decision-maker. While many appear to assume agencies have courts beat on this margin, to our knowledge, this oft-cited reason to increase the discretion of agencies and the deference afforded them by reviewing courts is void of empirical support. Contrary to the expertise hypothesis, we find evidence suggesting the Commission does not perform as well as generalist judges in its adjudicatory antitrust decision-making role. Furthermore, while the available evidence is more limited, there is no clear evidence the Commission adds significant incremental value to the ALJ decisions it reviews. In light of these findings, we conclude there is little empirical basis for the various proposals to expand agency authority and deference to agency decisions. More generally, our results highlight the need for research on the relationship between institutional design and agency expertise in the antitrust context.

We are in the progress of expanding the analysis and, as always, comments welcome here or at my email address on the sidebar.

The study highlighted some unusual trends.  Philadelphia case dockets are disproportionately larger relative to both its population and other state and federal courts.  Philadelphia plaintiffs are also relatively more likely to prefer jury trials and less likely to settle than other non-Philadelphia Pennsylvania plaintiffs.  The data appear to support the conclusion that Philadelphia courts demonstrate a meaningful preference for plaintiffs, by coaxing “business” from other courts and providing them with a unique combination of advantages; indeed, the PCLC’s own stated goals include a desire to “[take] business away from other courts.”   While these strategies have no doubt successfully increased litigation in Philadelphia, and benefit local Philadelphia attorneys, they also bring a substantial cost to Philadelphia businesses and consumers.

I’ve now conducted a preliminary supplemental analysis (available here) designed to test the proposition that the majority of plaintiffs in the PCLC are out-of-state without an apparent or substantive connection to either Philadelphia or even the State of Pennsylvania.  I considered a sample of about 1,400 of the mass-tort cases in the PCLC to determine if the plaintiff filing the case had a home address or had sustained the complained of injury either in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania. Although the findings are preliminary, the results indicate that a substantial fraction of plaintiffs with cases pending at the PCLC have no discernible or relevant connection to Philadelphia or Pennsylvania. This supplement to the original study provides strong evidence that the PCLC has succeeded in attracting a large number of out-of-state cases that comprise a substantial portion of the civil cases in Philadelphia.

The main conclusions of this supplemental analysis are as follows:

• Of the 1,357 cases in the sample, 913 (67.2%) were brought by plaintiffs who live out-of-state without any apparent connection to Pennsylvania or Philadelphia.
• Only 180 cases (13.3%) reveal plaintiffs who live in or allege injury in Philadelphia.
• The most substantial case types where the plaintiffs were overwhelmingly out-of-state are hormone therapy, denture adhesive cream, and Paxil birth defect cases.
• Although most or all of the companies involved in these cases do business in Philadelphia and a few have some sort of administrative offices there, the vast majority of defendants do not have their principal place of business in Philadelphia or even in Pennsylvania. It is unlikely that venue was moved to the PCLC in most or any of the cases.

A chart summarizing the results is available here at Table 1.

Baer, who is the chair of Arnold and Porter’s Antitrust Practice Group, also previously headed the Federal Trade Commission’s competition division when it stopped a merger between Staples and Office Depot in 1997.

He will replace Sharis Pozen, the acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, who plans to step down at the end of April. Pozen succeeded Christine Varney, who left last August.

Baer’s nomination, which was widely expected, still must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

…
Baer is seen as someone who would continue the present policies of the Justice Department’s antitrust office.

The division’s key outstanding cases include the purchase of Nortel’s patent assets by a consortium led by Apple, and Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility. It also has a number of criminal price-fixing probes.

Mr. Baer is a very well respected figure in the antitrust community and I expect this to be perceived — as it should be — as a very high quality appointment.

The concluding comments of the Fed study are worth repeating here:

The significant tightening in household access to mortgage credit likely reflects not only a correction of the unsound underwriting practices that emerged over the past decade, but also a more substantial shift in lenders’ and the GSEs’ willingness to bear risk. Indeed, if the currently prevailing standards had been in place during the past few decades, a larger portion of the nation’s housing stock probably would have been designed and built for rental, rather than owner occupancy. Thus, the challenge for policymakers is to find ways to help reconcile the existing size and mix of the housing stock and the current environment for housing finance. Fundamentally, such measures involve adapting the existing housing stock to the prevailing tight mortgage lending conditions–for example, devising policies that could help facilitate the conversion of foreclosed properties to rental properties—or supporting a housing finance regime that is less restrictive than today’s, while steering clear of the lax standards that emerged during the last decade. Absent any policies to help bridge this gap, the adjustment process will take longer and incur more deadweight losses, pushing house prices lower and thereby prolonging the downward pressure on the wealth of current homeowners and the resultant drag on the economy at large.

Translation: If we can expedite the transition of our housing stock, we can turn this economy around faster. The study offers several policy prescriptions, including facilitating the conversion of foreclosed properties to rental properties, minimizing unnecessary foreclosures through the use of a broad menu of types of loan modifications, and supporting policies that facilitate deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure or short sales.

On page 14 (of a 26 page report), the study offers yet another approach: land banks, which are described as “public or nonprofit entities created to manage properties that are not dealt with adequately through the private market.” Before the free-market crowd gets worked up, they should recognize that a string of abandoned homes generates a negative externality in a neighborhood, which is precisely the occasion for intervention. Properties acquired by land banks may be rehabilitated as rental units or demolished, as market conditions dictate, which could harness deflationary forces caused by excess supply and neighborhood blight.

My only nit with the section is that the Fed limits the land-bank option to “low-value properties,” which they seem to define as properties below $20,000. This is too timid: If land banks are successful at revitalizing neighborhoods—imagine a park in every neighborhood—then why limit the policy to homes that are effectively worthless? Despite this limitation, the Fed calls for increased funding and technical assistance to existing land banks and for creating a national land bank program.

Kudos to the Fed for taking such a bold stand! If only we could get the debate moderators to ask candidates how to solve the housing mess.

Spirit Airlines says a new federal regulation aimed at protecting consumers is forcing it to charge passengers an additional $2 for a ticket.

The fee, which Spirit calls the “Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences Fee,” has been added to each ticket effective immediately, according to Misty Pinson, a Spirit spokeswoman.

The new DOT regulation allows passengers to change flights within 24 hours of booking without paying a penalty. The airline says the regulation forces them to hold the seat for someone who may or may not want to fly. As a consequence, someone who really does want to fly wouldn’t be able to buy that seat because the airline is holding it for someone who might or might not end up taking it.

In short, DOT is requiring airlines to give consumers a real option to change their flight plans at zero cost within a 24 hour window. Spirit rightly recognizes that options have value. Not only is there a value to consumers in ‘buying’ such an option, there is a cost associated with providing the option; in this case, the opportunity cost of selling seats that may be held for someone that will exercise the option to cancel without a fee.

Obviously, DOT head Ray LaHood is unimpressed.

“This is just another example of the disrespect with which too many airlines treat their passengers,” Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an e-mailed statement. “Rather than coming up with new and unnecessary fees to charge their customers, airlines should focus on providing fair and transparent service — that’s what our common sense rules are designed to ensure.”

Perhaps Mr. LaHood doesn’t understand the concept of options and option value. The right, but not the obligation, to undertake an activity (particularly under pre-specified terms) is clearly an economic good.  The very notion that DOT’s new regulation is touted as “consumer friendly” recognizes that it creates additional value for consumers. That is, it’s giving something away that is of value…a property right to change one’s mind at zero cost. However, it is disingenuous of Mr. LaHood to object to the idea that giving away value imposes a cost on the one providing the value (and I don’t mean the DOT, but the airlines who must honor the consumer’s exercise of the option).

A better solution might be to require airlines to explicitly offer the option of a no-penalty change within a 24-hour window. Then consumers could choose whether to pay the fee and airlines might discover the true market value of that option. Spirits’ $2 may be too high. More likely, it’s too low. Many airlines already do offer the option of a no-fee cancellation and the fare differential is much higher than $2, but that option typically has a much longer maturity…any time after booking up until departure. A shorter maturity window should command a lower option value.

Spirit Airlines may be the epitome of nickle-and-diming air travel consumers, something many consumers (myself included in some cases) don’t appreciate. However, there is no denying that Spirit understands the nature of options and their value. And there’s also no denying that, based on its stock price over the past year, Spirit is doing at least as well as industry leaders in providing consumers value for the options they choose. Perhaps instead of casting aspersions, Mr LaHood and his staff should invite Spirit to teach them about this fairly fundamental concept of options and option value rather than imposing regulations with so little regard for their true costs.