Mercatus Center

Got Pain? A Virtual Swim with Dolphins May Help Melt It Away Allison Aubrey | NPR | Tweeted by Jennifer Huddleston Virtual reality has many emerging uses, but research shows pain management may be one of the most promising. The Truth about Faster Internet: It’s Not Worth It Shalini Ramachandran, Thomas Gryta, Kara Dapena, and Patrick Thomas | The Wall Street Journal | Retweeted by Adam Thierer After months of net neutrality advocates lamenting that internet speeds would be hurt by its repeal...

Major League Soccer (MLS) officials announced Tuesday that St. Louis is getting a MLS expansion franchise, growing the league to 28 teams. This is great news for local soccer fans, but if St. Louis learned anything from their stadium subsidy for their former NFL team—which has been called the “most scandalous deal in the country”—it’s that public officials should demand that any new stadium project be 100 percent privately funded. Even today, three years after the Rams moved back to Los...

Good morning, Representative Grove and members of the York County Legislative Delegation. My name is Eileen Norcross. I am vice president for policy research and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. My research focuses on state and local fiscal institutions and policies with an emphasis on the solvency of state pension plans and the comparative fiscal performance of the states. Thank you for inviting me today to provide testimony on the current fiscal...

On March 8, 2018, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, President Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. US manufacturers may request an exemption to Section 232 tariffs from the Commerce Department. If tariffed materials do not pose a threat to national security and there is insufficient domestic supply, then Commerce may issue an exemption. Other manufacturers have 30 days to object to these requests before Commerce...

Professional sports stadiums attract new business, create construction jobs, and increase local economic growth—or at least, that’s what we’re told. The truth is that the vast majority of peer-reviewed academic research finds that stadiums actually don’t contribute to economic growth, nor do they create measurable benefits in the local community. This probably sounds odd, given that there’s a multitude of studies that purport to predict incredible benefits from stadium construction or...

Dockless electric scooters are one of several new mobility modes sweeping across America that provide a solution to the “last mile” problem, the often difficult to cover distances between where traditional transportation like cars or buses end and where a person actually needs to get.  The first scooter companies (like Bird and Lime) popped up overnight without asking permission or even alerting policymakers. What policy tools are available for municipalities that want to empower innovators...

It would take an ordinary person almost three years to read the entire US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which contained nearly 104 million words in 2017. The sheer size of the CFR poses a problem not just for the individuals and businesses that want to stay in compliance with the law but also for anyone interested in understanding the consequences of this massive system of rules. States also have sizable regulatory codes, which add an additional layer to the large body of federal...

The global imbalance between fast-growing emerging markets and more sluggish advanced economies is a key reason for extremely low and even negative yields on safe assets, British economist Chris Crowe argues on Monday’s edition of the Macro Musings podcast. Crowe, head of economic and flow research at London-based hedge fund Capula Investment Management LLP, estimated that total available safe assets peaked around 70 percent of global gross domestic product in 2009-10 and are now only...

David Beckworth: Our guest today is Chris Crowe. Chris is head of economic and flow research at Capula Investment Management, a London based hedge fund, where he covers global economics, primarily the G10 countries plus China. He was previously UK economist at Barclays for two years and prior to that worked at the International Monetary Fund for five years. He has also published in top economic journals. Chris joins us today to give us a perspective of a macroeconomist from inside a hedge...

My August 14 InsideSources column, Bad Bipartisan Ideas on Drug Prices, questioned the logic of two Trump Administration proposals aimed at driving down prescription drug prices: (1) allowing drug imports from Canada and (2) tying Medicare’s drug prices to an index of prices paid in other countries. President Trump views lower drug prices in Canada and elsewhere as “global freeloading” on American ingenuity. He’s not entirely wrong; Americans do pay the lion’s share of research and...