Boetkke on Buchanan

by Levi Russell

I've enjoyed reading every bit of George Mason University economist Peter Boettke's work that I've had the time to read in the past several years. His work is very interesting in part because he addresses issues most of us don't spend a lot of time on. In this post, I reproduce some of my favorite quotes from a recent speech Boettke gave. The speech focuses on Jim Buchanan's perspective on economics generally and political economy specifically. As usual, I suggest you read the whole speech, as it is very good and very short.

The problem as Buchanan sees it is that economics as a discipline has a public purpose, but modern economists have shirked on that purpose and yet are still being rewarded as if they were earnestly working to meet their educational obligation. As he put it:“I have often argued that there is only one ‘principle’ in economics that is worth stressing, and that the economist’s didactic function is one of conveying some understanding of this principle to the public at large. Apart from this principle, there would be no general basis for general public support for economics as a legitimate academic discipline, no place for ‘economics’ as an appropriate part of a ‘liberal’ educational curriculum. I refer, of course, to the principle of the spontaneous order of the market, which was the great intellectual discovery of the eighteenth century” (1977 [2000]: 96).

Prices serve this guiding role, profits lure them, losses discipline them, and all of that is made possible due to an institutional environment of property, contract and consent. These are the basic principles from which we work in economics. Important to note, economic analysis relies neither on any notion of hyper rational actors myopically concerned with maximizing monetary rewards, nor on postulating perfectly competitive markets. It relies simply on the notion that fallible yet capable human beings are striving to better their situation, and in so doing enter into exchange relations with others. Atomistic individualism and mechanistic notions of the market is, as Buchanan has stressed, nonsensical social science.

From a Buchanan perspective, basic economics can be conveyed in 8 points.
1.Economics is a "science" but not like the physical sciences. Economics is a "philosophical" science and the strictures against scientism offered by Frank Knight and F. A. Hayek should be heeded.
2. Economics is about choice and processes of adjustment, not states of rest.Equilibrium models are only useful when we recognize their limits.
3. Economics is about exchange, not about maximizing. Exchange activity and arbitrage should be the central focus of economic analysis.
4. Economics is about individual actors, not collective entities. Only individuals choose.
5. Economics is about a game played within rules.
6. Economics cannot be studied properly outside of politics. The choices among different rules of the game cannot be ignored.
7. The most important function of economics as a discipline is its didactic role in explaining the principle of spontaneous order.
8. Economic [sic] is elementary.

A Modest Proposal for Improving Health Insurance and Care

by Levi Russell

I want to start off by saying I'm not an expert in health insurance or healthcare economics. That said, I've read my fair share of analysis on the subject and understand how the math of insurance works. In the current debates over the ACA vs the AHCA, "high-risk pools," redistribution, and (largely academic) discussions over the inability of insurers to accurately price risk due to regulations, I thought I'd sketch out what I think is a basic free-market healthcare "system." Please note that I often talk about the mistake of committing the Nirvana Fallacy, so none of what you read below should be interpreted as a claim that "markets are perfect" or any other silly Utopian view. I think there's a lot that can be done to simply improve on current policy. Here I discuss how I would like to see that happen.

Health Insurance

The way I see it, the primary problem with the current health insurance system is that it isn't actually insurance. It's a third-party payer system in which people pre-pay primarily for routine care. These plans have low deductibles, co-pays, and high "premiums." Again, a large percentage of one's "premiums" aren't really premiums.

These generous "insurance" plans are a product of decades-old payroll tax policy. Employees are taxed on their earnings, but are not taxed on so-called "fringe benefits." Employers, competing for the best talent, provided more and more generous fringe benefits rather than increase taxable wages. This led to the current comprehensive health insurance plans prevalent today and created the perverse third-party-payer incentives that have driven up the cost of insurance and care.

Due to concentration in the (massively regulated) medical care industry, hospitals are able to dramatically inflate the cost of care, which pushes up premiums. Insurance companies, also a highly concentrated industry partly thanks to the ACA, have very little incentive to negotiate for lower prices resulting in a bizarre circumstance in which paying out of pocket for routine care is cheaper than using comprehensive care "insurance."

Given these problems, what can we conclude about policy changes that could improve insurance?

1. Stop favoring "fringe benefits" with payroll tax policy. This will allow for a divorce of employment from health insurance, partly solving the pre-existing condition issue.

2. Stop forcing insurers to ignore basic health factors in pricing insurance and to cover pre-existing conditions. This has led to more concentration and certainly hasn't helped drive premiums down overall. However we handle redistributive aspects of health care, we certainly need a functioning price system.

3. Remove caps on contributions to health savings accounts. Provide subsidies to low-income people in the form of tax credits so they can afford catastrophic plans and can contribute to their health savings accounts (HSAs). This will allow parents to ensure that their children have insurance for horribly tragic terminal conditions long before they are born. This would also go a long way to solving the pre-existing conditions problem.

4. Provide something like Medicaid/Medicare for the (I suspect relatively small number of) people who would fall through the cracks if the changes in 1, 2, and 3 above were made.

For more of my thoughts on HSAs, including an example, see this FH post.

UPDATE - Joshua Hendrickson at Ole Miss pointed me toward this article on health insurance by John Cochrane at U Chicago. I recommend checking it out.

Health Care Costs

It stands to reason that one primary cause of high insurance costs is that the care itself is expensive. All sorts of laws restrict the ability of consumers to find primary care at affordable rates: certificate of need laws (which put the power to increase the quantity of medical care facilities up to a state-level board consisting of hospital administrators; discussed here and here on FH), scope of practice laws (which restrict the ability of nurses and nurse practitioners to provide routine care, thus decreasing the supply of care and increasing costs), restrictions on direct primary care (a fee-based service that connects doctors and patients directly without the use of "comprehensive care insurance"), and a whole host of other things I'm probably missing.

In my mind, whatever happens at the federal level, we will continue to see states move away from their restrictive laws and increasingly allow doctors and patients to make decisions about health care on their own. As this article notes, monthly fees for all-inclusive primary care through a "direct primary care" physician can be as low as $25 per person thanks to the reduction in bureaucratic paperwork. This podcast interview has more information. Thanks to innovative medical entrepreneurs, there's even a surgery center in Oklahoma that posts all-inclusive prices for all the procedures they perform on their website. I assume I don't need to tell you that their prices are far below what a typical hospital would charge an insurance company for the same procedures. Imagine that; the price system works to provide care at low costs when it is not chained down by bureaucracy.

As Milton Friedman said, there are no panaceas. Health insurance and health care will never be free and some people will have a tough time taking care of their medical bills. This is true regardless of the institutional structure; the world isn't perfect. However, I think the points discussed above would improve outcomes across the spectrum, especially for those in the bottom two income quintiles. Reduce restrictions on health care providers, allow doctors and patients to interact directly without excessive red tape, level the playing field for HSAs and catastrophic insurance plans (i.e. actual insurance), and provide cash assistance or some other means of helping those who fall through the cracks. As a result, we'll get lower costs, more choice, and far less deadweight loss. What are your thoughts?

Bryan Caplan on Pricing and Market Power

by Levi Russell

Previously on the blog, I've shared Bryan Caplan's interesting perspective on monopoly and market power. He recently wrote another post that is at least as interesting as the first one I discussed. Below I reproduce the first half of his post.

In the real world, prices often seem far above marginal cost.  Yesterday, for example, I bought a pair of tweezers for $14.99.  But it's hard to see how the marginal cost - metal, electricity, transportation, miscellaneous - could even reach $1.00.  That's a markup well in excess of 1000%.  If you're steeped in the perfectly competitive model, where price always equals marginal cost, it's easy to feel "ripped off" whenever you make a purchase.

The obvious rebuttal is to point to all the fixed costs of production.  While the marginal pair of tweezers costs pennies to produce, the first pair plausibly costs millions.  Factoring in fixed costs, tweezer producers are probably roughly breaking even.  So how is that a "rip-off"?

But on reflection, this greatly understates what a fantastic deal we consumers get.  To see why, I often invoke my Consumer Gratitude Heuristic.  Here's how it works.  When I bought my tweezers, I asked myself, "How much would it have cost me to make these tweezers all by myself?"  On reflection, the answer is... more than my lifetime wealth!  I'd have to spend years learning the basics of mining and metallurgy to acquire minimal competence.  And after a lifetime of training, I still probably wouldn't have the skill to make a single tweezer as good as the one I bought at Wegmans.  $14.99 versus more time than I have on Earth: that's what I call a bargain.

Caplan goes on to note that this is not an exceptional case. Indeed it isn't; Leonard Reed's famous "I, Pencil" is really a great example of what Caplan is getting at as well. If you're interested in more technical economics on this, I suggest a (tragically forgotten) paper by Armen Alchian (short summary at the end of this FH post) on fixed cost and marginal cost.

Sam Peltzman on Antitrust and Humility

by Levi Russell

Over at the ProMarket blog, there's a great interview of Sam Peltzman on industry concentration. The whole thing is worth reading, but I thought I'd reproduce what I think are probably the most controversial of Peltzman's responses.

Q: Which industries should we be concerned with when we look at questions of concentration?

The traditional answer, embedded in the merger guidelines, is “be concerned if concentration increases in an already concentrated industry.” The evidentiary basis for this is thin. A much older literature struggled vainly for years to find a broad pattern whereby adverse effects of concentration could be localized to highly concentrated industries. I am unaware that the state of knowledge on where we should be concerned—or indeed if we should be concerned—has improved much. Basically, antitrust policy relies more heavily on beliefs rather than a strong consensus about facts.

Q: The five largest internet and tech companies—Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—have outstanding market share in their markets. Are current antitrust policies and theories able to deal with the potential problems that arise from the dominant positions of these companies and the vast data they collect on users?

See my answer to [the question above]. It is hubris to believe that economists and antitrust officials can predict the future, which is what you need to do in this sector. Who remembers that free web browsers were once thought to be a dangerous threat to competition?

Q: President Trump has signaled before and after the election that he may block mergers and go after certain dominant companies. What kind of antitrust policies should we expect from him? Pro-business, pro-competition, or political antitrust?

See [the questions above]. I prefer humility to hubris.

Big Ag Antitrust Blog Symposium

by Levi Russell

Recently I was part of a blog symposium put together by the International Center for Law and Economics at the Truth on the Market blog. The posts were quite diverse in terms of subject matter and perspective, so I think they're worth a read if you want to get a better understanding of what is going on with the Bayer/Monsanto, Dow/DuPont, and ChemChina/Syngenta mergers and acquisitions. There were some great contributions from the lawyers and economists on the panel and I was humbled to be invited to be a part of it. Below are links to the posts in order of the authors' last names.

Shubha Ghosh - Patents and mergers

Allen Gibby - Conglomerate effects and the incentive to deal reasonably with other providers of complementary products

Ioannis Lianos - Finding your way in the seeds/agro-chem mergers labyrinth

Geoffrey Manne - Innovation-driven market structure in the ag-biotech industry

Diana Moss - Mergers, innovation, and agricultural biotechnology: Putting the squeeze on growers and consumers?

Nicolas Petit - Antitrust review of ag-biotech mergers: Appropriability versus cannibalization

Levi Russell - Contestability theory in the real world
                        Effects of gene editing on ag-biotech antitrust

Joanna Shepherd - Understanding innovation markets in antitrust analysis

Michael Sykuta - Innovation trends in agriculture and their implications for M & A analysis

Is Corruption an Issue in Antitrust?

by Levi Russell

Antitrust has been a big issue in agriculture recently. The Bayer-Monsanto merger, the dairy industry settlement last year, and a relatively new suit regarding chicken price fixing have been consistently making headlines. Here at FH, I've been critical of the standard perspective on market contestability (here and here) and the tension between economic regulation and antitrust policy. In this article on the Stigler Center's blog, William Shughart applies public choice theory to antitrust enforcement. His basic point is that antitrust enforcement is just as susceptible to capture as other forms of regulation. Below are some excerpts, but I definitely encourage you to read the whole piece. It's pretty short.

Standing on the shoulders of at least one giant, my former colleague and frequent co-author the late Robert Tollison, I laid out the special interest group basis of antitrust in Antitrust Policy and Interest-Group Politics (Quorum, 1990). That book documented the political pressures brought to bear on antitrust law enforcers, including those of congressional oversight committees and the competitors of antitrust defendants, that shape enforcement outcomes at every stage of the process. The rent-seeking and rent-defending efforts of the parties involved in both public and private antitrust lawsuits are consistent with Olson’s Logic. The antitrust authorities, no less than regulatory authorities, are vulnerable to capture by the collective interests of groups having the most salient stakes in antitrust law enforcement outcomes.

It is tempting to think that antitrust law enforcers—and the judges who rule on such matters—are immune from the self-interested motivations of ordinary mortals, that the parties involved look only to the “public’s interest” by protecting consumers from the depredations of profit-seeking business enterprises. A review of more than a century of the actual practices of applying the relevant laws points in the opposite direction.

Antitrust is economic regulation and, as such, is amenable to scholarly evaluations of it within the same analytical framework. If not, scholars will continue to bemoan antitrust’s failures rather than seeing them as the predicable outcomes of an understandable political process, helping to explain the secular rise and fall of activist intervention against mergers and the behaviors of so-called dominant firms both at home and abroad.3)

Antitrust bureaucrats, judges and the parties who can bring the laws to bear to their own benefit are rational actors, not Madison’s fictional angels able to shed their parochial interests in the courtroom. The evidence is clear. Chicago School scholars, if anyone, should take off their rose-colored glasses.

Ag Potpourri - Feb 2017

by Levi Russell

Having recently completed a tour of the state discussing forecasts for Georgia's 4 primary meat commodities, I thought I'd put up some articles on interesting issues looking ahead for 2017.

The guys over at Agricultural Economic Insights have a great post discussing 16 questions for ag in 2017. They have another post on exchange rates which should be interesting given recent GDP and labor numbers, and recent movement in the stock market.

Scott Irwin looks at ethanol profitability for 2017.

Expect a LOT of meat on the market over the next 2 years. The beef, chicken, and pork industries are dealing with massive supplies with no relief in sight.

Finally, anti-trust continues to be a hot-button issue in proteins, most recently on the poultry side. Also, there is potential for the new administration to take action on a controversial new GIPSA rule designed to limit market power among meat processors.

How Do We Fix Rent Seeking?

by Levi Russell

Over at the ProMarket blog, Asher Schechter summarizes some key arguments made at the recent ASSA meetings on rent seeking, antitrust enforcement, and inequality. The post is quite long (for a blog), so I'll just comment on some key paragraphs and leave the rest to the interested reader.

“In all areas of economics, the rules of the game are critical—that is emphasized by the fact that similar economics [sic] exhibit markedly different patterns of distribution, market income, and after tax and transfers income. This is especially so in an innovation economy, because innovation gives rise to rents—both from IPR and monopoly power. Who receives those rents is a matter of policy, and changes in the IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] regime have led to greater rents without having any effects on the pace of innovation,” said Stigltz.

 Stiglitz's complaint about rents from innovation is telling. As I've discussed previously here at FH, if we take a dynamic view of competition, the rents (i.e. profits in excess of all costs) from innovation are merely an inducement to continue innovating. The value of the innovations themselves are still determined by the consumer and the "monopolist" is still incentivized to create what the public wants.

So, taking his last claim at face value, what would explain increasing profits to innovators without concomitant increases in innovation? I don't buy the intellectual property argument. More likely, it's the seemingly unceasing increase in regulation in so many industries. It explains reductions in the pace of innovation because it restricts entrepreneurs from doing what they believe is best for customers. It explains increasing profits because it keeps out new entrants and potentially pushes out smaller competitors.

Both Stiglitz and Deaton agreed that tougher antitrust enforcement is “incredibly important” in reducing inequality (an argument that was explored at length in ProMarket as well), rejecting claims that diminishing the role of government and regulation is the key.

What to do about increasing concentration? Ramp up antitrust enforcement, of course! The problem here is that a move back to the old ways of measuring market power, namely concentration indices, don't accurately capture market power. The work of Israel Kirzner, Harold Demsetz, and William Baumol bear this out. Stiglitz and Deaton seem to want more (or at the very least, not less) regulation, and more antitrust enforcement. The problem is that regulation creates barriers to entry that enhance market power of incumbents!

Campaign finance reform, he said, “would reduce the current selection of Representatives and Senators who are beholden to deep pockets. It’s hard to be elected to Congress or to stay elected without support from well funded interest, and that’s as true in recent years for the Democrats as for Republicans. Congressmen and Congresswomen are the farm team for K-Street.”

Another phrase for "campaign finance reform" is "abridgement of the first amendment." If we're concerned about the power of K Street Lobbyists (and I think we should be), it seems reasonable to address them directly, rather than through potentially damaging the freedom of political speech. If you want to reduce K Street's influence, the most direct way to do so is to reduce the scale and scope of power of the administrative bureaucracy and the legislature.

I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on these selections or on any other topic discussed in the article linked above!

More on Contestability and the Baysanto Merger

by Levi Russell
In a previous post, I discussed monopoly concerns with Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto. The deal was recently approved by Monsanto shareholders but will likely face significant scrutiny from anti-trust regulators.

In the previous post, I went through a paper by several Texas A&M economists that examined the likely consequences of the acquisition for several row crop seed prices. In this post, I'll make some other comments on contestability.

The A&M paper sticks to standard IO theory:

Concentrated markets do not necessarily imply the presence of market power. Key requirements for market contestability are: (a) Potential entrants must not be at a cost disadvantage to existing firms, and (b) entry and exit must be costless.

In contrast to standard IO theory, VRIO analysis suggests costs are always lower for incumbent firms. Managers of incumbent firms have experience with the specific marketing, managerial, and financial aspects of the industry that new entrants simply don't or must obtain at an additional cost.

Does this imply that no industry is "contestable" in an abstract sense? No. As I pointed out previously, prices are falling in many industries, even in those in which entry would entail 1) significant advantages for incumbents and 2) significant sunk costs. It does imply that the conditions for "contestability" are broader than the standard definition. The resource-based view of the firm provides an alternative view of contestability: The advantages for incumbents and potential sunk costs must simply be small enough that they are outweighed by an entrepreneur's expectation of economic profit associated with entering the industry.

So, when we see apparent divergences between price and marginal cost, as I see it there are three possibilities:

1) there are costs we as third-party observers don't see
2) the economic profit is associated with short-term returns to innovation (e.g. monopolistic competition)
3) there is a legal barrier to entry that is extraneous to the market itself.

This dynamic perspective (which I argue is easily teachable to undergrads) is much more powerful in advancing our understanding of real-world market behavior. Yes, the more unrealistic assumptions made in standard theory allow for more elegant mathematical modeling, but if our goal is to understand causal factors associated with firm behavior, the resource-based view of the fiirm, VRIO analysis, and other dynamic theories are more useful.

The Poultry Price Paradox - Why Are Turkeys Cheaper During Thanksgiving?

Guest Post
by David Williamson

Over the holiday, Catherine Rampell wrote a piece for the New York Times that raised an interesting question. Why are turkeys cheaper during Thanksgiving when demand is higher? Rampell offers two possible explanations, but I am not totally convinced by either of them. So, I will spell out my concerns with each of Rampell's explanations below and offer a third explanation of my own. Rampell's comments are in block quotes and mine are not.

Explanation #1 (Rampell) - Turkeys are "Loss Leaders"

The most intuitive and popular explanation for a high-demand price dip is that retailers are selling 'loss leaders.' Stores advertise very low prices — sometimes even lower than they paid their wholesalers — for big-ticket, attention-grabbing products in order to get people in the door, in the hope that they buy lots of other stuff. You might get your turkey for a song, but then you also buy potatoes, cranberries and pies at the same supermarket — all at regular (or higher) markups.

This is certainly the most popular explanation, but I worry that it ignores the consequences of competition. The way your store makes money selling turkeys at a loss is by attracting new customers that would normally buy potatoes, cranberries, and pies from your competitors' stores. But why would your competitors allow you to steal their customers? Wouldn't they lower the price of their turkeys in response? If so, wouldn't this cancel your effort to attract new customers and just leave you losing money on turkeys? Also, as an empirical matter, do stores really charge the same or higher prices for potatoes, cranberries, and pies during Thanksgiving? I can't find any systematic data to answer this question, but Kroger (America's largest traditional grocery store) had sales on all these items before Thanksgiving and not just turkeys.

Explanation #2 (Rampell) - Grocery Stores Are Price Discriminating

[P]lenty of economists...argue that it’s actually demand-side forces — changing consumer preferences — that drive these price drops. Consumers might get more price-sensitive during periods of peak demand and do more comparison-shopping, so stores have to drop their prices if they want to capture sales.

This explanation seems more theoretically consistent to me, but I think it rests on three shaky empirical assumptions. First, a grocery store needs market power to price discriminate. However, even after years of growing concentration, this industry is still pretty competitive (the top four firms account for less than 40% of sales). Second, to preserve its pricing strategy, a price discriminating grocery store needs to prevent others from buying in the cheap market (the Thanksgiving season) and selling in the expensive market (the rest of the year). But how do you stop anyone with a freezer from doing just that? Third, for charging consumers less in November to make sense, it must be that they are more price sensitive during the holidays. But is that true? Rampell gives some good reasons for why it might be true, but I can also see why they might not. Specifically, people tend to be more price sensitive when there are more close substitutes available. I am personally very sensitive to the price of Coke because there are always close substitutes (e.g. Pepsi). But it seems like there are very few substitutes for turkey during Thanksgiving. Would Thanksgiving be the same at your home if you served chicken instead?

Explanation #3 (Me) - The Costs of Stocking Turkey are Lower

My preferred explanation is that because grocery stores are competitive, they must charge prices that reflect the marginal costs of the products they sell. Therefore, if the price of turkeys is higher in July than November, it must be because each turkey is more costly to sell. The tough part is figuring out why. One reason turkeys might be more expensive for grocers to sell in July is that they don't sell very quickly that time of year (i.e. they have low "turnover"). Low turnover means higher costs for grocery stores because every day a product sits unsold on your shelf, you are giving up money you could have earned by stocking something that would sell more quickly. When turkeys start flying off the shelves in November, the cost of stocking each turkeys drops and that is reflected in the price. An advantage of this explanation is that it also implies that we would expect the price of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie to be lower during Thanksgiving, which I think is the case.

What do you all think? Am I missing something important about Rampell's argument? Am I wrong that higher turnover means lower marginal costs? Are there other reasons why turkeys might cost less to sell and product in November? Your comments are much appreciated. Happy Holidays!

Monopoly Concerns with Baysanto

by Levi Russell

The recent merger of DuPont/Pioneer with Dow and the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer have sparked a lot of discussion of market concentration, monopoly, and prices. A recent working paper published by the Agriculture and Food Policy Center (AFPC) at Texas A&M University written by Henry Bryant, Aleksandre Maisashvili, Joe Outlaw, and James Richardson estimates that, due to the merger, corn, soybean, and cotton seed prices will rise by 2.3%, 1.9%, and 18.2%, respectively. They also find that "changes in market concentration that would result from the proposed mergers meet criteria such that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission would consider them “likely to enhance market power” in the seed markets for corn and cotton." (pg 1) The paper is certainly an interesting read and I have no quibble the analysis as written. However, some might draw conclusions from the analysis that, in light of other important work in industrial organization, are not well-founded.

The first thing I want to point out is that mergers an acquisitions can, at least potentially, result in innovations that would justify increases in the prices of the merged firm's products. To the extent that VRIO analysis is descriptive of firm's behavior with respect to innovation, we would expect that better entrepreneurs would be able to price above marginal cost. Harold Demsetz made this point in his 1973 paper Industry Structure, Market Rivalry and Public Policy. The authors of the AFPC study point this out as well, but the problem is that, even though we have estimates of potential price increases due to the mergers, it is very difficult to determine whether any change in price in the future is actually attributable to market power or simply due to innovation in the seed technology.

Secondly, the standard models of monopoly assert that pricing above marginal cost is at least potentially a sign of a firm exercising market power. Here, articles by Ronald Coase and Armen Alchian are relevant. I provided a discussion of the relevant portions in a previous post so I'll just briefly summarize here: pricing above marginal cost is an important signal that the current market demand is potentially not being met by the firms in the industry. It's a signal to other potential investors that entering the industry might be worth it. Further, there is an issue of measurement. Outside observers may calculate fixed cost, variable cost, and price and determine that a firm is pricing above marginal cost. However, there may be costs of which said observers are unaware. For example, there may be significant uncertainty (which is not the same as risk) about the future prospects of the industry. This is certainly possible in the biotechnology industry since the government heavily regulates firms in this sector. This is not to say that such regulation is bad or should be removed, simply that it presents costs that are difficult for outsiders to calculate.

Finally, I want to examine one part of the analysis in the AFPC paper. On pages 10 and 11, the authors write (citations deleted):

A market is contestable if there is freedom of entry and exit into the market, and there are little to no sunk costs. Because of the threat of new entrants, existing companies in a contestable market must behave in a reasonably competitive manner, even if they are few in number.

Concentrated markets do not necessarily imply the presence of market power. Key requirements for market contestability are: (a) Potential entrants must not be at a cost disadvantage to existing firms, and (b) entry and exit must be costless. For entry and exit to be costless or near costless, there must be no sunk costs. If there were low sunk costs, then new firms would use a hit and run strategy. In other words, they would enter industry [sic], undercut the price and exit before the existing firms have time to retaliate. However, if there are  high sunk costs, firms would not be able to exit without losing significant [sic] portion of their investment. Therefore, if there are high sunk costs, hit-and-run strategies are less profitable, firms keep prices above average costs, and markets are not contestable. 

I submit that under this definition, scarcely any industry on the planet is contestable, yet we see prices fall in many industries over time, even in those we would expect to have significant sunk costs and in which we would expect incumbents to have significant cost advantages over new entrants.

 Image source.

It's true that we sometimes must make simplifying assumptions that are at odds with reality to forecast future market conditions. However, some might infer from the AFPC paper (though I stress that the authors do not) that something must be done by anti-trust authorities to unwind the mergers and acquisitions under discussion. To infer this would be to commit the Nirvana Fallacy. To expect anything in the real world (whether in markets or in the policymaking arena) to be "costless" is an impossible standard.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of these mergers and whether seed prices move sharply upward in coming years. What is certain is that there is tremendous causal density in any complex system, such as the market for bio-engineered seed. Thus, policymakers should be humble and cautious about applying the results of theoretical and statistical analysis in their attempts to better our world.

Remembering Ronald Coase

by Levi Russell

The third year anniversary of Ronald Coase's death was last Friday. My Facebook and Twitter were alive with remembrances of this great economist, so I thought I'd put a few articles/videos/podcasts related to Coase for FH readers.

Though Coase is most famous for his work on transaction costs, what I find most interesting about his is his unique approach to economics in general. In the opening of this video interview, Coase says "Economics has become a theory-driven subject and I believe the approach should be empirical. You study the system as it is, understand why it works the way it does, and consider what changes could be made and what effects they would have." Coase derisively referred to abstract theoretical economics as "blackboard economics." In reading his work, the reader gets the sense that Coase is looking at the behavior of real people and trying to determine the underlying causal mechanisms. This is what makes Coase a great economist.

Here's an article on Coase that gives his background and surveys his most popular work. Here's a video featuring lectures on Coase's contributions by other well-known economists.

The video I linked to above, as well as this blog post of mine featuring Deirdre McCloskey, corrects the record on "the Coase Theorem." Speaking of my blog posts, here's another one that provides a summary of one of Coase's lesser-known, but no less fantastic, papers.

Finally, this post of mine summarizes a point by Bryan Caplan that, given his stated perspective on economic theory, I think Coase would have appreciated. It's a simple empirical observation that fundamentally challenges typical applications of standard monopoly theory.

Howard Baetjer on Regulators as Monopolists

by Levi Russell

Howard Baetjer (Towson University) has an interesting article arguing that, in many cases, regulators behave like monopolists. I've written on the subject of monopoly several times over the last year or so (this one and this one are particularly relevant) and I've personally thought a lot about the ideas Baetjer explores in his piece.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some really good paragraphs:

Among the most important services in society is assuring the quality and safety of goods and services. We want assurance, for example, that our taxi drivers are competent and their cars are safe, that our banks have adequate capital, that our medicines are safe and effective, and that our schools teach our children well.

And yet the government agencies that regulate the quality and safety of these are legal monopolies. Those they regulate are required to abide by the government agencies’ decisions; the regulated enterprises have no freedom to choose different quality-assurance services from some competing entity instead. Government regulatory agencies are thus not regulated by market forces and, accordingly, they are not directly accountable to the public they are supposed to serve. ... They are indirectly accountable to the public through the political process, but that process puts so much distance between the public and the government regulator that regulators are effectively left unregulated.

So, government regulators are unregulated monopolies.

 ...

To be clear, these regulatory agencies do not have monopolies in the strict sense that no other provider of quality assurance is allowed to operate. For example, some taxi companies may distinguish themselves by enforcing particularly high standards of cleanliness and punctuality; banks could join associations that certify their exceptionally large capital cushions; and name-brand drug manufacturers try to distinguish their products as better than generics. In all these cases, however, the government regulator is the only quality assurer to whose standards all the enterprises in the industry must by law conform. Additional requirements over and above what the government requires are allowed, but the government’s requirements are mandatory. In this sense government regulators have monopolies. 

Specialization and Trade - A Reintroduction to Economics

That's the tile of Arnold Kling's newest book. It's published by the Cato Institute and is available in e-book format on Amazon for a mere $3.19. You can also download a PDF copy here free. Arnold Kling is an MIT trained economist who spent the bulk of his professional economic career at the Federal Reserve and Freddie Mac. Kling's blog, one of the best on the web in my opinion, is always thought-provoking. As the title of his blog suggests, he makes every effort to understand and fairly state the positions of those with whom he disagrees.

I read a couple of blurbs about the book last week and have only just finished the first chapter. So, rather than write a review, I'll reproduce a section of the Introduction that gives a short description of each chapter. Kling certainly has a unique perspective and I suspect I'll learn a lot from this relatively short book.

“Filling in Frameworks” wrestles with the misconception that economics is a science. This section looks at the difficulties that economists face in trying to adopt scientific methods. I suggest that economics differs from the natural sciences in that we have to rely much less on verifiable hypotheses and much more on hard-to-verify interpretative frameworks. Economic analysis is a challenge, because judging interpretive frameworks is actually harder than verifying scientific hypotheses. 

“Machine as Metaphor” attacks the misconception held by many economists and embodied in many textbooks that the economy can be analyzed like a machine. This section looks at a widely used but misguided approach to economic analysis, treating it as if it were engineering. The economic engineers are stuck in a mindset that grew out of the Second World War, a conflict that was dominated by airplanes, tanks, and other machines. Their approach fails to take account of the many nonmechanistic aspects of the economy. 

“Instructions and Incentives” deals with the misconception that economic activity is directed by planners. This section explains that although people within a firm are guided to tasks through instruction from managers, the economy as a whole is not coordinated that way. Instead, the price system functions as the coordination mechanism. 

“Choices and Commands” is concerned with the misconceptions held by socialists and others who disparage the market system. This section explains why a decentralized price system can work better than a centralized command system. Central planning faces an information problem, an incentive problem, and an innovation problem. 

“Specialization and Sustainability” exposes the misconception that we must undertake extraordinary efforts in order to conserve specific resources. This section explains how the price system guides the economy toward sustainable use of resources. In contrast, individuals who attempt to override the price system through their individual choices or by imposing government regulations can easily miscalculate the costs of their actions. 

“Trade and Trust” addresses the misconception among some libertarians that the institutional infrastructure needed to support specialization and trade is minimal. Instead, this section suggests that for specialization to thrive, societies must reward and punish people according to whether they play by rules that facilitate specialization and trade. A variety of cultural norms, civic organizations, and government institutions serve this purpose, but each of those institutions has its drawbacks. 

“Finance and Fluctuations” deals with the misconceptions about finance that are common among economists, who often fail to appreciate the process of financial intermediation. This section looks at the special role played by financial intermediaries in enabling specialization. Intermediation is particularly dependent on trust, and as that trust ebbs and flows, the financial sector can amplify fluctuations in the economy’s ability to create patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. 

“Policy in Practice” corrects the misconception that diagnosis and treatment of “market failure” is straightforward. This section looks at challenges facing economists and policymakers trying to use the theory of market failure. The example I use is housing finance policy during the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008. The policy process was overwhelmed by the complexity of the specialization that emerged in housing finance. Moreover, the basic thrust of policy was determined by interest-group influence. The lesson is that a very large gap exists between the economic theory of public goods and the practical execution of policy. 

“Macroeconomics and Misgivings” argues that it is a misconception, albeit one that is well entrenched in the minds of both professional economists and the general public, to think of the economy as an engine with spending as its gas pedal. This section presents an alternative to the mainstream Keynesian and monetarist traditions. I argue that fluctuations in employment arise from changes in the patterns of specialization and trade. Discovering new patterns of sustainable specialization and trade is more complex and subtle and less mechanical than what is assumed by the Keynesian and monetarist traditions.

Nirvana Fallacy Watch: Stiglitz Edition

by Levi Russell

Joseph Stiglitz recently put out a column called "Monopoly's New Era." He starts off with the standard story that unregulated markets lead to monopoly and that anti-trust is an important check on that process. He talks specifically about power relationships and gives the example of asymmetric information.

Stiglitz claims that, since perfect competition theory can't explain many of the monopolized industries we have today, that his brand of economics, which takes the tendency of "unregulated" markets to monopolization as a fundamental assumption, is rising in popularity.

That may be the case, but, I think, not for the right reasons. Stiglitz seems to think that Smith, Schumpeter, and other "free market" economists take a simplistic econ 101 view of competition:

In today’s economy, many sectors – telecoms, cable TV, digital branches from social media to Internet search, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, agro-business, and many more – cannot be understood through the lens of competition. In these sectors, what competition exists is oligopolistic, not the “pure” competition depicted in textbooks. A few sectors can be defined as “price taking”; firms are so small that they have no effect on market price. Agriculture is the clearest example, but government intervention in the sector is massive, and prices are not set primarily by market forces.

Of course, free market economists don't take that simplistic view, as I've discussed previously here, here, and here. It is this comparison, between wise intervention tutored by Stiglitz's theories and the vagaries of the free market, that I think is problematic.

Stiglitz is right to point out that many industries lobby for special government favors, but he doesn't acknowledge the reality that policies designed to correct market failures are often the cause of monopoly. As I noted in a previous post:

Government regulations essentially amount to fixed costs that prevent new firms from entering markets and existing smaller firms from competing with larger firms. Maybe these regulations are still justified, but it's not plainly obvious using the static model Thoma seems to prefer. From their inception, anti-trust suits were and still are brought mostly by competitors, not consumers. A look at the data from the late 19th and early 20th centuries doesn't tell the same "Robber Baron" story we hear in 9th grade history texts. Output was expanding and prices falling in the industries accused of being dominated by monopolies.

Stiglitz's mistake is that he compares the real world with a rose-tinted view of government regulation:

Many of the assumptions about market economies are based on acceptance of the competitive model, with marginal returns commensurate with social contributions. This view has led to hesitancy about official intervention: If markets are fundamentally efficient and fair, there is little that even the best of governments could do to improve matters. But if markets are based on exploitation, the rationale for laissez-faire disappears. Indeed, in that case, the battle against entrenched power is not only a battle for democracy; it is also a battle for efficiency and shared prosperity. 

Arnold Kling's article on Masonomics effectively responds to Stiglitz's claim:

Somewhere along the way, mainstream economics became hung up on the concept of a perfect market and an optimal allocation of resources. The conditions necessary for a perfect market are absurdly demanding. Everything in the economy must be transparent. Managers must have perfect information about worker productivity and consumers must have perfect information about product quality. There can be nothing that gives an advantage to a firm with a large market share. There cannot be any benefits or costs of any market activity that spill over beyond that market. 

The argument between Chicago and MIT seems to be over whether perfect markets are a "good approximation" or a "bad approximation" to reality. Masonomics goes along with the MIT view that perfect markets are a bad approximation to reality. But we do not look to government as a "solution" to imperfect markets. 

Masonomics sees market failure as a motivation for entrepreneurship. As an example of market failure, let us use a classic case described by a Nobel Laureate, which is that the seller of a used car knows more about the condition of the car than the buyer. Masonomics predicts that entrepreneurs will try to address this problem. In fact, there are a number of entrepreneurial solutions. Buyers can obtain vehicle history reports. Sellers can offer warranties. Firms such as Carmax undertake professional inspections and stake their reputation on the quality of the cars that they sell. 

Masonomics worries much more about government failure than market failure. Governments do not face competitive pressure. They are immune from the "creative destruction" of entrepreneurial innovation. In the market, ineffective firms go out of business. In government, ineffective programs develop powerful constituent groups with a stake in their perpetuation.

Stiglitz is right that static models of perfect competition don't explain the economy well, but he makes an unfounded leap of logic based on his idyllic view of policy. Harold Demsetz warned about these leaps of logic when he wrote about the Nirvana Fallacy. Avoiding this fallacy is, I think, an important part of policy analysis.

P.S.
Don Boudreaux points to one tragically bad prediction of Stiglitz's model: Venezuela.

Intentions, Faith, and the Nirvana Fallacy

I've addressed the Nirvana Fallacy several times on this blog, and keep finding new examples of it, especially in the popular press. Many economists seem to be unaware of this fallacy and Mark Thoma is no exception. I've critiqued him previously on this issue, but his most recent commission of the fallacy is especially interesting. Below I share key parts of his recent CBS News column (in block quotes) with some of my commentary.

The Nirvana Fallacy, as put forth by UCLA economist Harold Demsetz, is the comparison of real-world phenomena to unrealistic ideals. The mere fact that economic models can specify a perfect policy solution to a problem doesn't imply that real-world political and legal institutions can successfully implement that policy. More importantly, though, imperfections in markets which are the result of informational inefficiencies can't be solved readily by governments because the governments themselves lack the necessary information.

In addition to being quite confident about the ability of economic models to generate policies that "break up monopoly" and "force firms to pay the full cost of pollution they cause," Thoma seems to put a lot of stock in the intentions of regulators and politicians.

When government steps in to try to correct these market failures -- breaking up a monopoly, regulating financial markets, forcing firms to pay the full cost of the pollution they cause, ensuring that product information is accurate and so on -- it's not an attempt to interfere with markets or to serve political interests. It's an attempt to make these markets conform as closely as possible to the conditions required for competitive markets to flourish. 

The goal is to make these markets work better, to support the market system rather than undermine it.

It may very well be that all legislators and regulators have the purest of intentions. Even so, that doesn't imply that their policies will actually achieve the results they desire. Good intentions are a necessary but not sufficient condition for efficient and effective government solutions. Decades of work in public choice economics and more recent work in behavioral public choice show that the implementation of government policies is fraught with its own government failures. Why doesn't Thoma mention these?

Perhaps the clearest example of the Nirvana Fallacy in Thoma's column comes a few paragraphs down:

In other cases, it's less well understood that failure is the reason for the government to regulate a market, or even provide the goods and services itself. Social security and health care come to mind. But once again, the private sector's failure to deliver these goods at the lowest possible price, or to deliver them at all, is at the heart of the government's involvement in these markets. (emphases mine)

Here we have Thoma's standard for real world markets. They must deliver certain goods and services at the lowest possible price. What does he mean by "possible?" Possible in the abstract world of economic theory? Why is this a relevant comparison? Does Thoma also propose we hold the actual activities of politicians and regulators to such an ideal?

Further, I'm not sure what he means by "deliver them at all." We have accidental death and dismemberment insurance, life insurance, and health insurance in private markets and have had them for a long time. We've had health care for much longer than the government has been as heavily involved as it is now. In fact, the evidence suggests that political favoritism killed a very useful alternative health care system for the poor and blue-collar folks back in the 1930s. On the insurance side of things, it's at least plausible that increases in payroll taxes decades ago helped bring about employer-provided insurance and exacerbate the problem of preexisting conditions.

Finally, let's unpack the last two paragraphs in Thoma's column. He writes:

Conservatives tend to have more faith in the ability of markets to self-correct when problems exist, and less faith in government's ability to step in and fix market failures without creating even more problems. Honest differences on this point are likely, but there are certainly cases where most people would agree that some sort of action is needed to overcome significant market failures.

Where to start? From his use of the word "conservative" as the only descriptor of his intellectual opponents, it's clear that Thoma is thinking about this as a purely political issue, not as a technical economic issue. He also seems to think that mere faith is the only reason someone might disagree with his view. Conservatives, he says, have more faith in markets and less faith in governments. Again, the public choice literature documents quite well the problems actual politicians and regulators have with implementing the idealized policies derived from economic models. He goes on to say that honest differences are "likely," not "possibly justified" or "important to consider." It seems Thoma can't conceive of a reason for his opponents to doubt the ability of the government to fix the problems he sees with the world outside of pure ideology.

Thoma's final paragraph really demonstrates the problems with the static model through which he views the world:

However, when ideological or political goals (such as lower taxes for the wealthy or reduced regulation so that businesses can exploit market imperfections) lead to attacks on those who call for government to make markets work better -- often in the guise of getting government out of the way of the market system -- it undermines government's ability to promote the competitive market system the opponents claim to support.

Government regulations essentially amount to fixed costs that prevent new firms from entering markets and existing smaller firms from competing with larger firms. Maybe these regulations are still justified, but it's not plainly obvious using the static model Thoma seems to prefer. From their inception, anti-trust suits were and still are brought mostly by competitors, not consumers. A look at the data from the late 19th and early 20th centuries doesn't tell the same "Robber Baron" story we hear in 9th grade history texts. Output was expanding and prices falling in the industries accused of being dominated by monopolies.

Richard Langlois' recent testimony to the British Parliament on dynamic competition provides some important critiques of static models. Here are some excerpts:

On monopoly and barriers to entry:

There are only two ways that a platform can maintain prices above marginal costs. One is to be more efficient that one’s competitors – to have lower costs, for example. Such a situation would not be “policy relevant,” in the sense that taking regulatory or antitrust action against the more-efficient competitor would make society worse off. The other way to maintain price durably above marginal cost is to have a barrier to entry.  

The static and dynamic views are in agreement that competition requires free entry. Taking a static view often leads to intellectual confusions about the nature of barriers to entry (that they can arise from the shape of cost curves, for example); but in the dynamic view it is clear that barriers to entry are always property rights – legal rights to exclude others.(1) For example, one can have a monopoly on newly-mined diamonds if one owns all the known underground reserves of diamonds. More typically, especially in the case of platforms, the property rights involved are government-created rights of exclusion, either in the form of intellectual property or regulatory barriers.

On the abuse of market power:

What if it is customers who complain about the “abuse” of market power? To an economist, the problem with market power is the (static) inefficiency it creates. There is no such thing as the “abuse” of market power. Economists have understood for some time that a firm possessing market power cannot by its own actions increase that market power. The only way a firm can get market power (apart from being more efficient) is to possess a barrier to entry. What many see as “abuses” are usually what modern-day economists have come to call non-standard contracts: contractual practices beyond the simple calling out of prices in a market, practices that seem “restrictive.” These practices are often solutions to a much more complicated problem of production and sales than is contemplated in the simplified models of market power. They are very frequently an effort to overcome problems created by high transaction costs.(2)

The quality of discussions of the benefits of government intervention would be greatly improved if some notion of the costs of such intervention were mentioned. This would include discussions of dynamic models of competition and the explicit admission that politicians and regulators are subject to the same cognitive biases and information problems that cause real-world markets to deviate from the perfection of static economic models.

Behavioral Public Choice - A Literature Review

Bryan Caplan recently posted about a fantastic West Virginia Law Review article that provides a lengthy discussion of the intersection of public choice (the application of economics to politics) and behavioral economics (the application of psychology to economics). 

Here's a segment of the introduction sans footnotes:

Behavioral public choice is both an extension of and a reaction to behavioral economics and its counterpart in legal scholarship, behavioral law and economics. Psychologists and behavioral economists have documented imperfections in human reasoning, including mental limitations and cognitive and emotional biases. Their research challenges the rational actor model of conventional economics, especially the idea that individuals acting in a free market can make optimal decisions without the government's assistance. Behavioral economists and legal scholars in the behavioral law and economics movement have used this research to justify paternalistic government interventions, including cigarette taxes and consumer protection laws, that are intended to save people from their own irrational choices. 

Because of their focus on market participants and paternalism, most behavioral economists and behavioral law and economics scholars ignore the possibility that irrationality also increases the risk of government failure. Behavioral public choice addresses that oversight by extending the findings of behavioral economics to
the political realm.  

A key insight of behavioral public choice is that people have less incentive to behave rationally in their capacity as political actors than in their capacity as market actors. 

Another law and economics article entitled "Nudging in an Evolving Marketplace: How Markets Improve Their Own Choice Architecture" tackles a similar topic. Here's the abstract:

Behavioral economics claims to have identified certain systematic biases in human decision-making with the implied assumption — sometimes leading to an explicit policy proposal — that these biases can only be corrected through centralized planning. While the appropriateness of policy corrections to perceived biases remains an open debate, far less attention has focused on the role markets already play in “nudging” consumers toward more mutually beneficial outcomes. We describe a process by which markets evolve over time to satisfy consumer preferences — or risk failure and removal from the marketplace. By organizing our understanding of markets in this dynamic, evolutionary sense, we expose a basic logic that dominates market transactions as they occur in practice; that is, the mechanisms that ultimately survive market competition tend to compensate for, limit, or otherwise reduce the incidence of bias. We explore empirical evidence for this argument in the market for consumer financial products.

This brings to mind a few previous posts of mine on market dynamics and monopoly. You can read them here, here, and here.

Tumbler Competition - The Rise and Fall (?) of the Yeti

Some time last year I became aware of the phenomenon that is the Yeti brand. The company makes what appear to me to be wildly over-priced coolers and tumblers. They have successfully built a lifestyle around their brand seemingly through social media marketing and word of mouth. Living along the Texas coast, I regularly see their branding on bumper stickers, hats, and of course the coolers themselves.

The prices for their tumblers seem particularly egregious: $40 for a 30 oz. and $30 for a 20 oz. The good thing about them is that they work. Several colleagues told me that they were able to keep drinks cold all day long. I received one as a Christmas gift last year and was quite impressed.

Sometime late last year I began seeing ads for a competing product by a company called RTIC. They claimed that their product was as good as the Yeti, but at half the price. The 30 oz. model could be had for $20 and the 20 oz. for $15. A YouTube video seems to confirm that the RTIC product performs as well as the Yeti.

Today a friend shared a post on Facebook that alerted me to yet another entrant into this market. Nearly-identical Ozark Trail-branded tumblers can be had from Wal-Mart for the low prices of $9.97 (30 oz.) and $7.97 (20 oz.). Currently the prices online are higher ($14.74 and $9.74, respectively) and are sold out.

This is a fascinating case study on the effects of competition and innovation on prices. I have little doubt that Yeti will be able to maintain its high-priced tumblers, at least for awhile, because it has built brand recognition. Certain segments of the population will pay more either because they don't shop around or because they want to have that YETI logo on the bottom edge of the cup.

Those of us who are willing to shop around and aren't concerned about brands are, thanks to competition, able to get the same drink-cooling performance at a much lower price (from a big-box store often vilified for the negative effects it supposedly has on the working class).

It's important to remember that price theory is ultimately about what goes on in our heads, not necessarily the "objective" components of a physical good. Having the YETI logo stamped on the outside of the tumbler might not make it any better in terms of its objective performance, but those who buy YETI for the sake of YETI are certainly, from their own point of view, better off than if they had purchased the other brands' offerings.

Relatively Good Regulation - GMO Edition

In previous posts on food labeling I've discussed food labels and the information they provide as well as possible reasons why a private GMO label hasn't already appeared. In this post, I'll discuss the reasons commodity groups are in favor of federal GMO labeling legislation.

Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) recently introduced legislation that would establish federal guidelines for GMO labeling. The law would preempt state mandates for GMO food labels and start an educational campaign for the public on the safety of GMO foods.

The question isn't whether farmers, food companies, and retailers believe the guidelines are good for them financially but whether these guidelines are better than the relevant alternative. I'd wager that food companies would, in an ideal world, prefer to label their food in a manner that maximizes their profit.

Since that world doesn't exist, and there's a credible threat that interest groups in some states will successfully pass legislation mandating GMO labels, federal preemption of such laws is preferable. For producer groups, federal preemption makes it less likely that potential discounts on conventionally-produced food will be passed on to them. Additionally, the cost of educating consumers will not be borne by food companies, retailers, and farmers but by taxpayers.

As I argued in a previous post, the tremendous cost of educating the public on the safety of GMO foods is one possible reason why we haven't seen widespread efforts by food companies or third parties to create a GMO labeling scheme.  Another possible reason is the presence of substitute labels. Many consumers who are concerned about the safety of GMO food might be content buying food labeled "organic."

The more I think about it, though, the more I'm convinced that the main reason we haven't seen a third-party, private effort to create a GMO label is that the public generally trusts only the federal government to ensure food safety. It's true we have all sorts of private labels informing consumers of the characteristics of the food they buy, but safety is a separate issue in most people's minds.

The new legislation introduced is likely to be a net benefit to farmers, food companies, and retailers. They'll be shielded from the risk of more onerous regulation at the state level and won't have to bear the cost of educating the public about GMO safety. This makes the bill, from their points of view, relatively good regulation.

Regulation and Rural Hospitals

A new working paper at the Mercatus Center looks at the effect of Certificate of Need (CON) laws on rural health care provision. CON laws require providers to get permission from state governments. This permission is ostensibly determined by the need for new facilities in an area. Currently, CON laws are on the books in 26 states primarily in the southeast, northeast, and northwest.
According to the authors, the primary concern that CON laws address in rural areas is that ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs) will engage in "cream skimming" which is the practice of refusing to treat poorer, more risky, or less well insured clients and only treating the easy cases. This would result in closures of rural hospitals reducing the quantity and quality of care in rural areas.

However, CON laws are literally a barrier to entry in the health care market, so it remains an open question whether this barrier to entry reduces the quantity of hospitals or, through some unintended consequence, increases the quantity of hospitals by preventing "cream skimming."