At Econ Journal Watch.   Professor Allen offers a wonderful personal history of the UCLA Economics Department, including the rise and fall of what he describes as “the Alchian Department.”    The entire article is worth reading, but I include here an excerpt from Professor Allen’s Nobel (and University Award) nomination on behalf of Armen…

Read the full piece here. 

There are some new developments in the Federal Trade Commission’s consummated merger case brought against Ovation.  Namely, the FTC has lost.  TOTM readers may recall that I spent some time criticizing the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint, back in 2008, in FTC v. Ovation in federal district court in Minnesota.  As I described the stylized facts back then…

Read the full piece here. 

Economist and occasional TOTM guest blogger Steve Salop (Georgetown) recently sent me the following questions spurred by the local debate over Governor McConnell’s proposal to private the retailing of alcoholic beverages…

Read the full piece here. 

This fall I’m teaching “Economics of Institutions and Organizations” to first-year graduate students. The reading list is rather heavy, compared to what most students are used to from their undergraduate courses and their first-year courses in microeconomics, econometrics, etc. I explain that they need to become not only avid readers, but also efficient readers, able to extract the maximum information from an academic article with the least effort. They need to learn, in other words, the art of the skim.

Read the full piece here.

Steve Salop, Serge Moresi, and John Woodbury have posted a very useful primer on the new HMGs new “value of diverted sales” approach to unilateral effects: the gross upward pricing pressure index (GUPPI).  Here’s the basic idea…

Read the full piece here. 

Intel Chairman and CEO Paul Otellini recently gave the keynote address at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum on the US regulation environment and its effect of innovation and economic growth (HT: CNET, WSJ).  The speech got some play in the media because of its overall depressing tone for the US, and its frank criticism of the current state of US regulatory affairs.

Read the full piece here.

Barring some sort of last extension Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP Extension Act (MMSEA) of 2007 will require all property casualty insurers to report all settlements, awards and judgments that involve a Medicare beneficiary to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Essentially the MMSEA turns subrogation rules on their head by requiring the defendant to notify a third-party if the plaintiff might owe them money. Under subrogation rules a third-party insurer with an interest in a case, think a health insurer who wants to be reimbursed by a defendant for the injuries caused to the insurer’s beneficiary, would have to join the case which of course would require finding out about the case in the first place.

Read the full piece here. 

Earlier this week, the WSJ reported on a nuance in the New York state tax code that has come take a bite out of at least one bagel company’s profits, and it illustrates how the complexities of arbitrary taxation schemes can rear their ugly heads and create incentives–and challenges–for consumers and sellers alike that would seem silly were it not for their very real economic impacts.

Read the full piece here.

The Economist points to a very interesting study by Stanford’s David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina on the use of deception in the business environment (HT: Brian McCann).  The article’s title, “How to Tell When Your Boss is Lying,” gets at the thrust of the piece.  Larcker and Zakolyukina look at conference call transcripts from 2003 and 2007 for evidence of determinants of companies who later ran into problems in the form of serious financial restatements or accounting errors.  Can you identify a CEO or CFO engaging in deceptive conduct during a conference call?  What sort of “tells” would you look for?

Read the full piece here.