Policy changes that encourage non-fossil fuel energy means increased reliance on batteries and other technologies that must develop rapidly. This article focuses on batteries, noting that key inputs come from corrupt countries, so little of the benefits of exports flow to citizens, and many key finished mineral products come from China. The United States thereby becomes more reliant on autocratic regimes. Using cobalt as an example, this article looks at the nature of its production, the inability of the United States to shoulder its share of the environmental burden of mineral extraction and refining, and looks to previous examples of countries “cursed” with valuable resources desired by wealthy countries. Hints as to how the “resource curse” problem may be addressed arise from the mineral extraction history of the United States many decades past.

In The Nature of the Firm, Ronald Coase explains how firms represent a suspension of the market mechanism. The allocation of activities depends on the relative costs of organizing activities within the firm versus direct reliance on the market. Despite Coase’s insight, economists often treat firms as black boxes with respect to innovation. Firms take in resources and produce innovations but why firms are successful at innovation is unspecified. As a result, the factors that enable wealth creation within the black boxes of firms, a key factor in economic progress, are little understood. Firms are not the only source of innovation, however. Economically valuable research also emerges from non-profit universities. They represent an alternative (which we term the “red box”) to research that occurs within firms’ black boxes, an alternative with specific advantages and disadvantages in producing innovations. In this Article, we argue that research in non-profit universities is distinct from research in a for-profit firm. As a result, the process of moving inventions from the university to the market usually occurs through licensing innovations to firms that have a comparative advantage in assessing possible market value of inventions and can risk capital to exploit innovations. Because successful commercialization of the product of research requires entrepreneurshipwe use the insights into entrepreneurship of economists Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner to begin to unpack the red box of university commercialization efforts. This Article examines the practices that have emerged after the Bayh-Dole Act’s grant of intellectual property rights to universities for the results of federally funded research and the many constraints imposed by university structure. It also considers how the differences in the incentive structure with black and red boxes create a role of university research.

The Varsity Blues investigation uncovered a seamy side of university admissions. Multiple wealthy parents were indicted for securing their children’s admission to selective institutions through bribery. Despite the publicity the indictments and guilty pleas received, and the public schadenfreude over the sight of celebrities being arrested, the investigation is most notable for what it did not do: it did not deploy the federal government’s arsenal of anti-money laundering and anti-corruption tools against the universities involved. This represents a significant missed opportunity to address the serious problems that arise from rationing access to selective institutions via opaque, easily manipulated admissions processes designed to benefit university constituencies. Without deploying the same tools used routinely against other for- and non-profit organizations, the chances for real reform are significantly reduced. We call for universities and their boards to be held to the standards applied to other institutions with respect to corruption and money-laundering in their oversight of admissions programs.

To use or conserve environmental and natural resources effectively is complex. Many economists believe that institutional solutions built around markets and property rights can help improve results. This approach addresses what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto termed the “missing lessons of U.S. history” – institutions whose designers may not have understood the outcomes that would occur, but the results were generally beneficial. However, technical economic analysis generally fails to persuade many at the policy level. Adding a focus on the practicality of solving issues by voluntary action will enrich the policy discussions. To do so requires economists to provide concrete examples of how to resolve environmental issues. In this Article, we contrast the narratives given to support markets and property rights and state-centered solutions. The analysis suggests how to frame issues to increase opportunities for market and property rights solutions to be more broadly considered. In short, economists must stop talking past the dedicated environmentalists who have learned to communicate effectively with the public but often lack practical tools that economists can provide, Better narratives allow economists to join the public conversation successfully.

This chapter explores higher education from a property rights perspective. It examines the wide range of property rights that exist in higher education from the perspective of the benchmark of individually exclusive and transferable rights. The chapter helps to distinguish the major functions of universities—governance, education, and research—because of the different right structures. The chapter is organized into three major parts. The first part deals with the administrative function, the second part with the education function, and the third with research. The "property rights" approach extends the theory of the firm and of consumer choice to explain behavior that emerges given alternative organizational arrangements. The rights of faculty, under the term academic freedom, often prevents administrators from imposing severe sanctions on faculty other than for moral transgressions. The application of property rights theory to the structure of higher education is insightful, even if tentative, toward understanding the workings of universities and the result of our nonprofit system of higher education.

Hundreds of hazardous waste sites are on the Superfund National Priority List in the United States, and thousands more could become eligible. The Superfund has spent or ordered the spending of billions of dollars, with little apparent impact on human health risks. While public perception of the real or imagined hazardous nature of consumer and industrial substances has resulted in widespread attention to the issue, lawsuits have proliferated with liability aimed at "deep pockets" instead of individual agents who may be responsible. Contributors to "Cutting Green Tape" carefully examine the existence and severity of the toxic harms and liability problem, the erosion of a clear tort legal system to settle disputes, and whether a clearly defined system of property rights could be developed to reduce the dangers from toxic substances. "Cutting Green Tape" rethinks the nature and impact of today's environmental bureaucracy. Rather than continue unworkable, cumbersome, and often contradictory regulations, "Cutting Green Tape" prescribes a clearer tort legal system to settle disputes and demonstrates that clearly defined environmental property rights would reduce the threat of toxic substances. Among the many topics addressed are: air toxins policy; pollution, damages, and tort law; risk assessment, insurance, and public information; protecting groundwater; regulation of carcinogens; contracting for health and safety; and toxin torts by government. The book converges on a central theme: when common law remedies, with their burden of proof and standards of evidence, are replaced by the legislatively mandated regulatory regimes described, a problem emerges. The bureaucratic "tunnel vision" described by Justice Stephen Breyer, tends to take over. The police powers of the state are given to bureaucratic decision makers who are limited only by the blunt instrument of political influence, rather than by the need to show harm or wrongdoing in an unbiased court (as the police are), or by a budget on expenditures set by the Congress (as most bureaus are). The excesses described in the chapters thus result not from incompetence in the bureaus, but from the expansive powers granted to decision makers who are tightly focused on the narrow mission they see before them.

Durable regulation emerges most often when there are two distinctly different special interest groups that seek the same policy outcome. One group takes the moral high ground by pursuing a publicinterested goal and gives the cooperative politician the ability to justify his actions on normative grounds. The other group, seeking the same policy outcome, is motivated by pecuniary interests, hopes to feather its nest, and is often willing to share some of the gains with the politicians who deliver the goods. Such collusion, intentional or not, is the basis for the “Baptist and Bootlegger” model of regulation developed by Bruce Yandle. Yandle originally discussed this model in Regulation (“Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a regulatory Economist,” May–June 1983) and recently coauthored a comprehensive book, Bootleggers and Baptists (Cato institute, 2014), on the topic with his grandson, Adam Smith. For example, both Bootleggers and Baptists like Sunday closing laws that shut down liquor stores one day a week. For Baptists, the law serves a high moral purpose. For Bootleggers, it eliminates competition one day a week. The fact that both interest groups seek the same policy outcome makes life more pleasant for politicians who seek to satisfy interest group demands for political favors. now consider the situation with electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) and their incumbent competitors: tobacco companies that produce and sell traditional cigarettes and drug companies that produce nicotine replacement therapies (nrTs). The U.S. cigarette market has been regulated, one way or another, since colonial times. Along the way,

Electronic cigarettes pose competitive threats to the makers of traditional cigarettes and nicotine replacement therapies such as nicotine gum and patches. It is no surprise that these producers, and the governments that earn revenue from tobacco taxes, respond by seeking controls on the competition. Similarly, despite evidence that e-cigarettes may be beneficial in helping tobacco smokers quit, assorted public health researchers and groups have attacked e-cigarettes as a health danger. This episode allows application of the Bootlegger and Baptist theory of regulation. Diverse groups, not necessarily working together, and with different motives, share in a goal of limiting how e-cigarettes enter the market. Those who profit from the current tobacco market structure and some health advocates plead for politicians and regulators to restrict the new product.