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Einaudi Center for International Studies

Cornell University

Einaudi Center for International Studies

The Third Function of Law Is to Transform Cultural Categories

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Author: Karla Hoff and James Walsh

How does law change society? In the rational actor model, law affects behavior only by changing incentives and information—the command and coordination function of law. Under the view that humans are social animals, law is also a guidepost for social norms that regulate behavior—the expressive function of law.

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  • CRADLE Law and Economics Papers

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Publication Year: 2019

New Technology and Increasing Returns: The End of the Antitrust Century?

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Author: Kaushik Basu

The advance of digital technology is changing the nature of markets, enhancing the capacity of corporations to extract more consumers’ surplus and lower the wages paid to workers. The rise of new technology has also diminished the efficacy of traditional laws to regulate firms and corporations. This is best illustrated by antitrust laws. With the new technology, there are greater returns to scale in production, and further, it is possible to have different components of the same final good be produced by different firms in faraway places.

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  • White Paper

  • CRADLE White Paper Series

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Publication Year: 2019

What the Federal Reserve Got Totally Wrong about Inflation and Interest Rate Policy: Getting Real About Rents

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Author: Daniel Alpert

Since the beginning of 2019, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) has begun to reconsider the wisdom of having increased its overnight policy interest rate by 100 basis point during the course of 2018, after increasing it by 75 basis points the year before. The FOMC has sent signals, with regard to its prospective actions this year, that are substantially more dovish than the guidance it delivered in 2018. The Fed’s motives may include some soft economic data and severe reversals in equity markets and long term interest rates during the last weeks of 2018, but it is clear that the FOMC’s approach to the policy rate in 2019 will be data dependent and far less dogmatic.

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  • White Paper

  • CRADLE White Paper Series

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Publication Year: 2019

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