Ronald Cass, dean emeritus of Boston University Law School, argues in today’s WSJ that the Supreme Court should overrule Dr. Miles…

Read the full piece here. 

Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok has a good post responding to recent attacks on the extension of credit to poor borrowers (and in particular, this rant from Nouriel Roubini).

Read the full piece here.

The insider trading trial of former Qwest CEO Joseph Naccio began yesterday. I’ve posted a couple of times (here and here) on Nacchio’s innovative defense, which the WSJ labeled a “black box” defense.

Read the full piece here.

Friday’s WSJ documented an effect of ethanol mandates…

Read the full piece here.

R. Foster Winans knows insider trading.

A former author of the Wall Street Journal‘s Heard on the Street column, Winans was a key figure in an insider trading case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In that case, Carpenter v. United States, the Court affirmed securities fraud and mail/wire fraud convictions against Winans, who tipped investors about the contents of forthcoming Heard on the Street columns.

Read the full piece here. 

I was searching through the eCCP site for some interesting antitrust reading material, which it always carries in surplus, and came across this testimony from Joe Sims (here is his Jones Day bio) at the Section 2 hearings discussing the lack of certainty in monopolization cases…

Read the full piece here. 

Brian Leiter has posted, with all the caveats that go along with using SSRN downloads to rank faculties, a new set of rankings using downloads for the past 12 months. Leiter lists the top 15 by total downloads and new papers in 2006 along with the share of total downloads attributable to the top 3 authors. The first thoughts that crossed my mind when I saw these rankings were: (1) I like the use of the share measure which I found informative; (2) I wonder what would happen using per capita downloads; and (3) should we be using per capita downloads for these sorts of rankings?

Read the full piece here.

Peter Klein‘s post over at the always excellent Organizations and Markets reminded me that I have been wanting to blog about the most recent exchange between Ben Klein and Ronald Coase over the asset specificity, vertical integration, and the famous Fisher Body – General Motors example which has become a classic example of hold up in the literature. While this example from the original Klein, Crawford, and Alchian (1978) piece is almost 30 years old, and has been the subject of literally thousands of pages of debate and an entire JLE issue (April 2000), there is still some disagreement over the facts and what they tell us about the relationship between asset specificity and vertical integration.

Read the full piece here.

Ben Klein’s new paper, “The Economic Lessons of Fisher Body – General Motors,” appears in the February 2007 issue of the International Journal of the Economics of Business. He is not about to give Ronald Coase the last word. Indeed, Klein writes, the newest evidence on the history of the relationship between Fisher and GM confirms his earlier claim that GM’s acquisition of Fisher in 1926 was a response to opportunistic behavior by Fisher. This evidence…

Read the full piece here.