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Much of the discussion in favor of simplicity of legal rules and against complex regulation is rooted in economically developed countries with strong state capacity. With economic development and state capacity comes the presumption that complex rules will be enforced. Therefore, analysis focuses on the administrative and error costs, and the unintended consequences of complex rules that are enforced. This paper argues that the Epsteinian insight is even more relevant to the developing world where countries often lack enough state capacity to even take on simple governance tasks. Developing countries often have less than 20 percent of the state capacity of developed countries. However, this does not mean they limit the regulatory structure to a fifth of the tasks. Under-enforcement or non-enforcement of complex rules imposes different costs and unintended consequences on society. Using examples from India, this paper highlights problems of enforcement swamping, deadweight loss, and corruption arising from the under-enforcement of complex rules. To avoid these problems, the paper concludes that a fortiori less developed countries should favor simple rules.

Mounting evidence suggests that economic dynamism and entrepreneurial activity are declining in the United States. Over the past 30 years, the annual number of new business startups and the pace of job reallocation have declined significantly. We ask whether this decline in dynamism can be explained by federal regulation. We combine measures of dynamism with RegData, a novel dataset leveraging the text of the Code of Federal Regulations to create annual measures of the total quantity of regulation by industry. We find that rising federal regulation cannot explain secular trends in economic dynamism.

Administering drug at a dose lower than that used in pivotal clinical trials, known as fractional dosing, can stretch scarce resources. Implementing fractional dosing with confidence requires understanding a drug’s dose-response relationship. Clinical trials aimed at describing dose-response in scarce, efficacious drugs risk underdosing, leading dose-finding trials to not be pursued despite their obvious potential benefit. We developed a new set of response-adaptive randomized dose-finding trials and demonstrate, in a series of simulated trials across diverse dose-response curves, these designs’ efficiency in identifying the minimum dose that achieves satisfactory efficacy. Compared to conventional designs, these trials have higher probabilities of identifying lower doses while reducing the risks of both population- and subject-level underdosing. We strongly recommend that, upon demonstration of a drug’s efficacy, pandemic drug development swiftly proceeds with response-adaptive dose-finding trials. This unified strategy ensures that scarce effective drugs produce maximum social benefits.

We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in police revenue retention from civil asset forfeitures to estimate how incentives to raise revenue influence policing. In a national sample, we find that local fine and forfeiture revenue increases faster with drug arrests than arrests for violent crimes. Revenues also increase faster with arrests of blacks and Hispanics than with whites’ drug arrests. Concomitant with higher rates of revenue generation, we find that arrests of blacks and Hispanics for drugs, driving under the influence, and prostitution, and associated property seizures, increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain revenues from forfeited property. Whites’ drug and driving under the influence arrests are insensitive to these institutions. We do, however, observe comparable increases in whites’ prostitution arrests. Our results show that revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior and decision-making, altering the quantity, type, and racial composition of arrests.

Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procurement, arguing that buyers should directly fund manufacturing capacity and shoulder most of the risk of failure while maintaining some direct incentives for speed. We analyzed the optimal portfolio of vaccine investments for countries with different characteristics as well as the implications for international cooperation. Our analysis, considered in light of the experience of 2020, suggests lessons for future pandemics.

We mine two public choice traditions for insights into intellectual property rights: the Virginia school, centered on James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the Bloomington or Institutional Analysis and Development school, centered on Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. We apply the perspectives of each school to issues of intellectual property and develop new insights, questions, and focuses of attention. We also explore tensions and synergies between the two schools on issues of intellectual property.

Online education has flexibility and cost advantages over in-class teaching and these advantages will grow with improvements in information technology. We consider likely market structures given that the quality aspects of online education exhibit endogenous fixed costs. Concentration in the market for courses could be high, as it is currently in the market for textbooks. The not-for-profit sector will exhibit lower costs, lower concentration, and possibly zero price.

We can imagine a plausible case for government support of science based on traditional economic reasons of externalities and public goods. Yet when it comes to government support of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for economic research, our sense is that many economists avoid critical questions, skimp on analysis, and move straight to advocacy. In this essay, we take a more skeptical attitude toward the efforts of the NSF to subsidize economic research. We offer two main sets of arguments. First, a key question is not whether NSF funding is justified relative to laissez-faire, but rather, what is the marginal value of NSF funding given already existing government and nongovernment support for economic research? Second, we consider whether NSF funding might more productively be shifted in various directions that remain within the legal and traditional purview of the NSF. Such alternative focuses might include data availability, prizes rather than grants, broader dissemination of economic insights, and more. Given these critiques, we suggest some possible ways in which the pattern of NSF funding, and the arguments for such funding, might be improved.

Due to the enormous economic, health, and social costs of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are high expected social returns to investing in parallel in multiple approaches to accelerating vaccination. We argue there are high expected social returns to investigating the scope for lowering the dosage of some COVID-19 vaccines. While existing evidence is not dispositive, available clinical data on the immunogenicity of lower doses combined with evidence of a high correlation between neutralizing antibody response and vaccine efficacy suggests that half or even quarter doses of some vaccines could generate high levels of protection, particularly against severe disease and death, while potentially expanding supply by 450 million to 1.55 billion doses per month, based on supply projections for 2021. An epidemiological model suggests that, even if fractional doses are less effective than standard doses, vaccinating more people faster could substantially reduce total infections and deaths. The costs of further testing alternative doses are much lower than the expected public health and economic benefits. However, commercial incentives to generate evidence on fractional dosing are weak, suggesting that testing may not occur without public investment. Governments could support either experimental or observational evaluations of fractional dosing, for either primary or booster shots. Discussions with researchers and government officials in multiple countries where vaccines are scarce suggests strong interest in these approaches.

Administering drug at a dose lower than that used in pivotal clinical trials, known as fractional dosing, can stretch scarce resources. Implementing fractional dosing with confidence requires understanding a drug's dose-response relationship. Clinical trials aimed at describing dose-response in scarce, efficacious drugs risk underdosing, leading dose-finding trials to not be pursued despite their obvious potential benefit. We developed a new set of response-adaptive randomized dose-finding trials and demonstrate, in a series of simulated trials across diverse dose-response curves, these designs' efficiency in identifying the minimum dose that achieves satisfactory efficacy. Compared to conventional designs, these trials have higher probabilities of identifying lower doses while reducing the risks of both population- and subject-level underdosing. We strongly recommend that, upon demonstration of a drug's efficacy, pandemic drug development swiftly proceeds with response-adaptive dose-finding trials. This unified strategy ensures that scarce effective drugs produce maximum social benefits.