Results for “"regulatory state is failing"”
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Sunday assorted links

1. Where have all the briskets gone?  A good lesson in supply chain economics.  And China to slap big tariffs on Australian barley exports.

2. Scarlett Strong on the updated source code.

3. Falling as a feature of Covid-19.

4. Dithering: a new podcast by Ben Thompson and John Gruber.

5. WHO conditionally backs the notion of Human Challenge Trials for vaccines.

6. Hockey analytics guy contributes to Covid-19 modeling.

7. Toward a theory of how and why UFOs would reveal themselves.

8. How much would you pay for this distanced (Dutch) meal?

9. “Citations for traveling faster than 100 mph have been numerous in recent days.

10. Millie Small, RIP (music video).

11. To be clear, I am not against this kind of article (NYT).  “Sweatpants and Caviar,” but in the paper edition it is called “A Chance to Think About Composing that Opera.”  Still, we can learn a bit from doing a small amount of modeling of how it came about.

12. A sad take, no matter which side you trust, our regulatory state is failing us.

13. “Ethics of controlled human infection to study COVID-19.”  That is what you might call “an establishment piece.”  On one hand, it is nice to see them not reject the idea, though they cannot agree on monetary compensation for exposure.  I wonder how they feel about fishing boats?

HHS turned down a big opportunity to make a lot of masks early

Another HHS official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There is a process for putting out contracts. It wasn’t as fast as anyone wanted it to be.”

The masks still are not being made, and this would be in Texas.  I’ll say it yet again: our regulatory state is failing us in this matter.  Here is a bit more:

From his end, Bowen [the mask maker] said his proposal seemed to be going nowhere. “No one at HHS ever did get back to me in a substantive way,” Bowen said.

The senior U.S. official said Bowen’s idea was considered, but funding could not easily be obtained without diverting it from other projects.

While we are on the topic of diverting funding, surely we would all agree that the NSF funding for the social sciences all should — for at least two years — be diverted to biomedical research?  I wonder how many economists are willing to tweet that policy recommendation.

One reason why food intended for restaurants is not reallocated to supermarkets

Nutrition labeling also frequently doesn’t comply with Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration guidelines for consumer sales, said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association, a trade organization for the consumer packaged goods industry. A company that sold hamburger buns to major fast food outlets could try to pivot to retail, but that entails changing packaging on the fly, a relaxation of labeling requirements and new distribution contracts.

Here is a longer story, about how supermarkets are changing, by Laura Reiley, interesting throughout.  I’ll say it again: America’s regulatory state is failing us.

Saturday assorted links

1. MIE: “This Man Owns The World’s Most Advanced Private Air Force After Buying 46 F/A-18 Hornets.

2. Romer tweet storm states his plan.

3. What did Kerala get right?

4. Is American innovation speeding up? (WSJ)

5. Icelandic volcanoes yikes?

6. Non-exemplary lives (ouch).  And what do the humanities do in a crisis?

7. Instagram strippers (NYT).  And Bret Stephens: our regulatory state is failing us (NYT).

8. “Believe women,” selectively.

9. BloombergQuint on Alex and Shruti.

10. A proposal for releasing British young people (ever listen to early Clash?).

11. Arnold Kling annotates (and likes) my Princeton talk.

12. A Swede explains Sweden to an Israeli: “Some maintain that the Swedish policy can succeed only in Sweden, because of its distinctive characteristics – a country where population density is low, where a high percentage of the citizenry live in one-person households and very few households include people over 70 cohabiting with young people and children. Those are mitigating circumstances which the Swedes hope will work to their advantage.”

Measuring the Cost of Regulation: A Text-Based Approach

We derive a measure of firm-level regulatory costs from the text of corporate earnings calls. We then use this measure to study the effect of regulation on companies’ operating fundamentals and cost of capital. We find that higher regulatory cost results in slower sales growth, an effect which is mitigated for large firms. Furthermore, we find a one-standard deviation increase in our preferred measure of regulatory cost is associated with an increase in firms’ cost of capital of close to 3% per year. These findings suggest that regulatory risk is a major cost to firms, but the largest firms are able to manage that risk better.

That is the abstract of a new NBER paper by Charles W. Calomiris, Harry Mamaysky, Ruoke Yang, a piece written in pre-Covid-19 times.  It has never been more relevant, except that the estimates for regulatory costs turn out to be far too low (no criticism of the authors is intended here).  To repeat my earlier point, America’s regulatory state is failing us.

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