February 7, 2022 | Urban Economics
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In a new report, my colleague Emily Hamilton and two coauthors make the case for what they call “light touch density,” a strategy of building denser types of housing, including those that HB 1177 would legalize in many New Hampshire towns.
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February 10, 2022 | Healthcare
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For decades Native Americans have experienced higher rates of mortality and chronic health problems than have other Americans. In “Native American Healthcare, Bureaucracy, and Poverty: Institutional Problems and Solutions,” Jordan K. Lofthouse and Kelcie McKinley find that both problems are the result of institutional barriers that keep Native Americans in poverty and of a healthcare system mired in bureaucracy. Immediate, small-scale policy changes and long-term institutional reforms are necessary for long-lasting improvements in outcomes.
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February 8, 2022 | Occupational Regulation and Licensure
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My own research and the research of other scholars have shown that licensing restricts entry into professions and leads to higher prices for consumers. The main takeaways of my comments are the following: Licensing is not the appropriate tool to regulate beauty services such as blow-dry hairstyling, eyelash extension application, makeup artistry, and threading. New Hampshire will not be unique if it exempts these services from licensing.
Occupational licensing is not the only way to regulate a service, but it is the most onerous way.
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February 7, 2022 | Monetary Policy
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The figure above illustrates the NGDP gap from 1997 to the present. In the second quarter of 2000, the NGDP gap was 4.38 percent, which means that nominal income was 4.38 percent higher than expected and that monetary policy was effectively too easy. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the NGDP gap was −5.53 percent, which means that nominal income, was 5.53 percent less than the public expected it to be and that monetary policy was effectively too tight.
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February 8, 2022 | Anti-trust
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The following is a lightly edited transcript of remarks provided by Mercatus Center Senior Research Fellow Alden Abbott, a former general counsel with the Federal Trade Commission, on the status of SEPs in the United States. Abbott focused on evolving U.S. Department of Justice policy statements from 2013, 2019 and 2021 (the latter in draft form), and on what these statements mean for SEP policy moving forward.
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The announced U.S.-Japan steel deal is similar to the previous U.S.-EU deal. It ends the applicable section 232 tariffs and instead establishes a new quota-like regime for tariff rates. On the surface, the deals appear to be trading one type of protectionism for another. Yet the new deals include specific provisions that aim to address the steel industry’s decades-long complaints about overcapacity and an emerging interest in tracking carbon intensity.
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February 7, 2022 | Regulation
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In recent years, a debate has raged over the Department of Energy (DOE)’s equipment standards, which regulate how much energy consumer and business products can use in their operations. A new report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) could help settle at least a few unanswered questions, but it may have come too late to have much impact.
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