ICLE Academic Affiliate Todd Zywicki joined NAFCUtv, the news program distributed by the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, to discuss the history of the Dodd-Frank Act’s so-called “Durbin amendment,” which established interchange price caps, as well as the recent Credit Card Competition Act and an overview of the market for credit cards and consumer payments. The full video is embedded below.

ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann joined The Reload podcast to discuss New Jersey’s new gun-carry insurance mandate and San Jose, California’s gun ownership insurance requirement. He said the requirements, which are the first of their kind, won’t accomplish the goal lawmakers have claimed. Namely, insurance companies can’t provide coverage for criminal acts. That basically leaves damage caused by accidental shootings as the only real option for coverage.

And even accidental coverage is more limited than most people realize. For instance, homeowners’ insurance–which San Jose now claims qualifies under its mandate–will cover accidental shootings, but only for damages done to third parties. That means any harm caused to the homeowner or family members living in the home wouldn’t be covered.

Lehmann said New Jersey’s requirement is even more problematic because it appears to be trying to require insurance against deliberate, and potentially criminal, acts. He said that’s not something any company offers nor is it a policy lawmakers could realistically force companies to offer. It also goes directly against the state’s complaints about “concealed carry insurance,” which are often not actual insurance policies but lawyer co-ops or group retainer plans.

Beyond the practical problems with the mandates, Lehmann said they also face an uphill battle in the courts. He explains why founding-era surety laws are a bad analogue for these modern requirements and why they are unlikely to survive the Bruen test in the long run.

Video of the appearance is embedded below.

ICLE Editor-in-Chief R.J. Lehmann joined On Point, a daily discussion program produced by WBUR radio in Boston, for a discussion of  the nation’s first gun-insurance mandate, which took effect this year in San Jose, California. Gun owners in the city are required to have liability insurance or they could be fined a minimum of $250. But can insurance actually help curb gun violence?

“Insurance in and of itself is never going to cover the kinds of violent events that people imagine it would because insurance can’t cover things that you do on purpose,” R.J. Lehmann says.

Guests

• Mayor Sam Liccardo, former mayor of San Jose, California. He championed the city’s first in the nation ordinance requiring gun owners to have gun liability insurance. The insurance mandate took effect Jan. 1st. (@sliccardo)
• Jennifer Mascia, senior news writer and a founding staffer at The Trace, which is a newsroom dedicated to covering gun violence. Read their article: Will Requiring Gun Owners to Buy Insurance Improve Firearm Safety? (@JenniferMascia)
• R.J. Lehmann, editor-in-chief and senior fellow of the International Center for Law and Economics. Read their article: Nation’s First Gun-Insurance Mandates Take Effect. Will They Hold up in Court? (@raylehmann)

Audio of the full episode is embedded below.

ICLE Chief Economist Brian Albrecht gave a presentation to the Arkansas Center for Research in Economics discussing the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises.” In this talk, he explored the recipients’ backgrounds and contributions to the practice of economics.

Video of the presentation is embedded below.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)—named for its chief sponsors, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D–Md.) and former Rep. Mike Oxley (R–Ohio)—was intended to restore trust in the transparency of publicly traded companies after the collapses of WorldCom and Enron Corp. revealed that their auditors had certified financial reports that overstated the firms’ assets and massively understated their liabilities.

But, of course, “transparency” isn’t quite the same thing as prudential safety and soundness. In the insurance space, more specifically, transparency doesn’t necessarily equal solvency.

Read the full piece here.

As the calendar flips to 2023, among the scores of new laws taking effect are a pair of legislative mandates that would, for the first time anywhere in the country, require firearms owners to obtain and maintain liability insurance. What remains to be seen, however, is whether either measure will survive Second Amendment challenges, particularly given the standard handed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen decision.

Read the full piece here.

Consumer legal funding’s sole purpose is to help individuals and families alleviate cash-flow problems after an accident, while seeking compensation for injuries through lawsuits.

Read the full piece here.

For many observers, the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX understandably raises questions about the future of the crypto economy, or even of public blockchains as a technology. The topic is high on the agenda of the U.S. Congress this week, with the House Financial Services Committee set for a Dec. 13 hearing with FTX CEO John J. Ray III and founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, followed by a Dec. 14 hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on “Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and the Harm to Consumers.”

Read the full piece here.

Abstract

Core organization design issues have emerged in recent popular and influential discussions of managers and organizations, specifically in a genre of writing—the “bossless company narrative”—that declares that the classic managerial hierarchy is dead. In this article, we review our critical discussion of this genre in our book, Why Managers Still Matter, arguing that the narrative manifests bad empiricism and half-baked organization theory. However, we also raise the possibility of a charitable reading of the genre: it points to themes in organization design theory that are currently underdeveloped, notably with respect to, for example, the impact of organizational structure and control on employee motivations and the importance of contingencies such as the characteristics of knowledge for organization design.