WSJ has a fascinating story this morning about a group of restaurants in Utah, Washington, Colorado and other places adopting a completely voluntary pricing system. No registers. No prices. No “suggested” prices and no tips. The business model is essentially to provide food and allow customers to put whatever they want in a lock box at the front of the store. This is similar to the former economist turned Bagel Man in Freakonomics who delivered bagels to DC area offices on a quasi-honor system.

Read the full piece here. 

My colleague Todd Zywicki offers an empirical rebuttal to the Warren-Tyagi “Two Income Trap” hypothesis which asserts that families with two incomes end up more leveraged than families with single incomes and more susceptible to negative economic shocks than otherwise for a number of reasons, including, e.g. counterproductive bidding for housing, child care expenses, etc.

Read the full piece here.

My GMU colleague Todd Zywicki and Gail Heriot (USD) have an op-ed in the Washington Times exposing Harvard Professors David Himmelstein and Elizabeth Warren’s study on medical debt and bankruptcy, presented to Congress earlier this week, as “one of the most misleading pieces of research ever placed before Congress” – no small dishonor.

Read the full piece here. 

Available here. Here are a few of the key findings of the study which examined the use of credit-based scores to determine automobile insurance rates…

Read the full piece here.

Frankly, I thought the movie, The Corporation, was unabashedly abysmal. It was a childish caricature, exhibiting no understanding by the filmmakers (or most of the interviewees) of the law, economics, or nature of corporations–to say nothing of capitalism. The movie is unsophisticated, anti-capitalist tripe.

Read the full piece here.

At his new and excellent blog Hodak Value, frequent TOTM commentor Marc Hodak offers the following in response to a post at the Daily Kos implying that Wal-Mart’s treatment of its workers should give rise to a level of concern similar to that of the Rwandan genocide…

Read the full piece here. 

Kate Litvak (UT Law, and friend of TOTM) , whose excellent paper (discussed around the blogosphere here and here), “The Effect of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on Non-US Companies Cross-Listed in the US,” has been selected as the best paper for the forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Corporate Finance associated with the Boundaries of Regulation conference.

Read the full piece here.

Benjamin Barber (the author of the polemic, Jihad vs. McWorld) has an editorial in the LA Times today.  Its title is:  “Overselling capitalism: Why today’s markets are headed for disaster unless there is a shift in focus.” At first the editorial looks like a pretty standard entry in the growing line of comments suggesting we deny credit to the poor–you know, for their own good.  But then it really goes off the rails.

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.