Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

Joe Asch has an interesting analysis of returns on university endowments over time (focusing on Dartmouth but comparing Dartmouth to over Ivy League institutions), comparing the returns of actively-managed endowments with those with a simple 60/40 equity-bond split. He notes that while actively-managed endowments beat the benchmark for the past year over the past five years […]

My friend Alex Chaufen has an interesting column on Forbes.com about the intellectual influence of economists on the Vatican.  I am told that he will have a second piece tomorrow as well.

Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley of FIRE have come across a doozy of a free speech case–a Modesto Junior College student who was prevented from distributing copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day. The student, a former Army veteran, recorded the incident.  Posted here. One of the illuminating things about this video is the combination […]

It appears that he is agin’ it (full document here). I’m not going to go into the wrongheaded economics here. Instead, what I think is curious about this document is a longstanding peeve of mine. Ever since the Galileo incident, the Catholic Church has generally tried to be careful to get its science right before it […]

Well, as if on cue–the OCC and FDIC have issued new guidance that places new restrictions on consumer access to Direct Deposit Advance products, which are functionally similar to payday lending but offered by banks. The main beneficiaries of new guidance, however, are not likely to be consumers, but payday lenders and bank overdraft programs, […]

I just posted a new article on SSRN co-authored with Robert Clarke, former Comptroller of the Currency. It is entitled “Payday Lending, Bank Overdraft Protection, and Fair Competition at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” and will be forthcoming in Boston University’s Review of Banking and Financial Law. Here’s the abstract: Abstract:  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau […]

In the past few months, at least two articles have come out that apply behavioral law and economics to the analysis of bank overdraft protection. One by Bubb and Pildes (forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review) and the other by Lauren Willis in The University of Chicago Law Review. Both articles make the same claim–that there are situations in […]

Asheesh Agarwal has a review of Josh Blackman’s book Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare over at the Liberty Law blog: The story of the Affordable Care Act is as twisted and bizarre as anything ever written by Stephenson, Kafka, or Orwell. It is an Act that saw the President oppose his signature legislation, before […]

At one point someone had posted several photographs related to the case of Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co.  They were vintage picture of the owner of the store, the store itself, etc.  I had a bookmark at the following location: http://www.aalscontracts.org/Cases/Williams.htm .  But that link doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Does anyone know if those photographs are […]

I have just posted a new Mercatus Center Working paper, “Commentary: CFPB Study on Overdraft Programs” co-authored with Michael Flores. You can get it here. Here’s the Abstract: Abstract The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released its initial analysis of bank overdraft programs in a June 2013 white paper. We review the report and provide […]

By now, some readers are familiar with the peculiar news that came out close to election day that the Libertarian Party candidate Robert Sarvis in Virginia was apparently been a stalking horse for supporters Democratic Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe to try to draw votes from Ken Cuccinelli. Nevertheless, he captured about 6.5% of the vote, potentially […]

Cass Sunstein had a couple of columns on Bloomberg here and here on Whittaker Chambers and the Tea Party (sort of hard to describe, so I’ll just leave it at that). Chambers biographer Richard Reinsch comments here with some additional thoughts. As for Rand and Chambers, I have found a lot to admire in both of them […]

I just finished reading a new Mercatus Center study by Benjamin M. Blau, “Central Bank Intervention and the Role of Political Connections.” The findings are summarized: Background The study uses data from a full-scale audit of the Fed conducted by the General Accounting Office to examine whether banks with political connections were more likely to […]

My friend and ardent civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate describes what he calls the “The Slow Death of Free Speech at Harvard” at Minding the Campus. Interesting historical analysis.

The WSJ has an article today on how President Obama could have “parsed” his words better when it came to his claim that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it. But the WSJ article seems awfully credulous about the supposed “parsing” that the Administration’s spinmeisters are putting on it.  Apparently, what the […]