A new version of the Scots Confession, 1560

Ian Hazlett’s chief aim in producing this new version of one of the key Reformation documents is to make the Scots Confession accessible to a new generation of readers. By carefully updating its language he has allowed the authentic voice of the Scots Reformers to come through to us loud and clear. He has also provided an extremely valuable introduction which will guide readers in exploring the Confession’s theological context more extensively.Publisher PD

Testimony, Understanding, and Art Criticism

I present a puzzle – the “puzzle of aesthetic testimony” – along with a solution to it that appeals to the impossibility of testimonial understanding. I'll criticize this solution by defending the possibility of testimonial understanding, including testimonial aesthetic understanding

A Classroom Inflation Uncertainty Experiment

This classroom experiment uses a double oral auction credit market to demonstrate how inflation uncertainty causes a wealth transfer between borrowers and lenders. The experiment also shows the social cost of inflation uncertainty when borrowers and lenders cannot agree on a nominal interest rate that compensates each for their risk. In this case, the credit market fails to allocate funds to the highest-valued investment projects. The experiment provides hands-on experience with the effects of anticipated and unanticipated inflation, giving students a common background for a discussion of the economic costs of inflation. It can be used in principles, intermediate macroeconomics, money and banking, or financial economics courses, with 860 students. It takes approximately 50 minutes to run and requires no computers.

A Classroom Investment Coordination Experiment

In this classroom experiment students represent firms that make investment decisions. They play a repeated game with each firm privately choosing its level of investment. Participating in the experiment helps students understand theories that posit coordination failure as the cause of economic fluctuations. Students see that when firms expect a recession, their resulting low levels of investment actually cause a recession. Likewise, when firms expect an expansion, their resulting high levels of investment cause an expansion. The experiment can be used in undergraduate principles or intermediate macroeconomics classes of 860 students. It does not require computers and takes approximately 50 minutes to run and discuss.

Economic and Political Consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act

See Crandall and Hazlett for a more recent analysis. This paper investigates the economic and political consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act by examining relevant marketplace data. In key segments of the telephone and cable television industries, the reform appears to be encouraging competition. Interestingly, stock price data indicate that the wave of "mega-mergers" in telecommunications, an unannounced and possibly unanticipated result of the Telecommunications Act, appears to be associated with consumer benefits. These improvements in competitiveness are modest by some standards, but impressive when judged against the results of other legislation with the announced goal of increasing market rivalry (e.g., the 1984 and 1992 Cable Acts). Federal policy makers also appear to be reaping benefits from the Telecommunications Act. The "deregulation"-which very cautiously opened markets, mandating extensive FCC rulemaking in the transition to competition-is associated with a sharp increase in political contributions to federal policymakers from telecommunications firms and executives. This is seen as an intended consequence of the act's major reform: Removing policy jurisdiction from Judge Harold Green's divestiture oversight and placing it in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency answerable to Congress.

Tragedy of the Regulatory Commons: LightSquared and the Missing Spectrum Rights

The endemic underuse of radio spectrum constitutes a tragedy of the regulatory commons. Like other common interest tragedies, the outcome results from a legal or market structure that prevents economic actors from executing socially efficient bargains. In wireless markets, innovative applications often provoke claims by incumbent radio users that the new traffic will interfere with existing services. Sometimes these concerns are mitigated via market transactions, a la “Coasian bargaining.” Other times, however, solutions cannot be found even when social gains dominate the cost of spillovers. In the recent “LightSquared debacle,” such spectrum allocation failure played out. GPS interests that access frequencies adjacent to the band hosting LightSquared’s new nationwide mobile network complained that the wireless entrant would harm the operation of locational devices. Based on these complaints, regulators then killed LightSquared’s planned 4G network. Conservative estimates placed the prospective 4G consumer gains at least an order of magnitude above GPS losses. “Win win” bargains were theoretically available, fixing GPS vulnerabilities while welcoming the highly valuable wireless innovation. Yet transaction costs—largely caused by policy choices to issue limited and highly fragmented spectrum usage rights (here in the GPS band)—proved prohibitive. This episode provides a template for understanding market and non-market failure in radio spectrum allocation

The Effects of Starvation on Crayfish Responses to Alarm Odor

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74621/1/j.1439-0310.2003.00902.x.pd

The Case for Liberal Spectrum Licenses: A Technical and Economic Perspective

The traditional system of radio spectrum allocation has inefficiently restricted wireless services. Alternatively, liberal licenses ceding de facto spectrum ownership rights yield incentives for operators to maximize airwave value. These authorizations have been widely used for mobile services in the U.S. and internationally, leading to the development of highly productive services and waves of innovation in technology, applications and business models. Serious challenges to the efficacy of such a spectrum regime have arisen, however. Seeing the widespread adoption of such devices as cordless phones and wi-fi radios using bands set aside for unlicensed use, some scholars and policy makers posit that spectrum sharing technologies have become cheap and easy to deploy, mitigating airwave scarcity and, therefore, the utility of exclusive rights. This paper evaluates such claims technically and economically. We demonstrate that spectrum scarcity is alive and well. Costly conflicts over airwave use not only continue, but have intensified with scientific advances that dramatically improve the functionality of wireless devices and so increase demand for spectrum access. Exclusive ownership rights help direct spectrum inputs to where they deliver the highest social gains, making exclusive property rules relatively more socially valuable. Liberal licenses efficiently accommodate rival business models (including those commonly associated with unlicensed spectrum allocations) while mitigating the constraints levied on spectrum use by regulators imposing restrictions in traditional licenses or via use rules and technology standards in unlicensed spectrum allocations.