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.

Paul Rubin (Emory Law) has an excellent piece in the WSJ taking state regulators to task for “Item Pricing Laws” which require that most goods in retail stores have an individual price sticker rather than, for example, a price tag on the store shelf. IPLs increase “menu costs” when retailers want to change prices which chills sales and are likely to increase prices. Luckily, one doesnt have to wait for the evidence because Professor Rubin and his co-authors have it.

Read the full piece here.

There’s just so much paper going back and forth on Leegin that it’s hard to keep up.

In addition to various briefs and commentaries and Commissioner Harbour’s de facto brief (also discussed here), there has been some interesting correspondence between Rep. Conyers, Chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Deborah Platt Majoras, Chair of the FTC.

Read the full piece here. 

Steve Levitt thinks that tenure is overrated. But relative to what? Levitt proposes doing away with tenure because it distorts the incentives of scholars to front load their productivity and then ride off into the sunset after tenure is granted. Surely he is right about this incentive effect.

Read the full piece here.

For the next two days, the Section 2 Hearings will explore “different methods of evaluating monopoly power in single-firm conduct cases, including issues relating to market definition, the Cellophane fallacy, the use of direct evidence, single-firm markets, and technology markets.”

Read the full piece here.