The Pre-1980 Roots of Neoliberal Financial Deregulation

U.S. financial deregulation is often popularly presented as a fundamental attack on financial regulation that began with neoliberalism's Big Bang in 1980. This paper argues this position is wrong in two ways. First, it is a process that stretches back decades before 1980. Textbook mentions of 1970s precursor "financial innovations" fall far short of presenting the breadth and duration of the pre-1980 attack on the system of regulation. Second, it has not been an across-the-board attack on financial regulation in the name of market efficiency as required by its ideology and claimed by its advocates, but rather a focused attack on only one of the five pillars of the system of regulation. This paper develops both of these assertions through a presentation of the five central pillars of the pre-1980 system of financial regulation, and the four major attacks on the three different aspects of the restrictions on financial competition.

The Financial Rate of Profit: What Is It, and How Has It Behaved in the United States?

This work contributes to the almost nonexistent literature on the profit rate of the financial sector. It updates the single study to include financial variables to cover the past decade, compares this profit rate to the (almost unpublished) Weisskopf and NIPA financial profit rates, compares the financial and nonfinancial sector rates, and details the procedure to construct the profit rate in the financial sector including relevant financial variables which capitalists consider to make profit-rate decisions. JEL Classification: B50, E11

Behavioral Economics and Physician Behavior

This study seeks to answer whether the availability heuristic leads physicians to utilize more medical care than is economically efficient. Do rare, salient events alter physicians' perceptions about the probability of patient harm? Do these events lead physicians to overutilize certain medical procedures? This study uses Pennsylvania inpatient hospital admissions data from 2009 aggregated at the physician level to investigate these questions. The data come from the 2009 Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4). The study is divided into two parts. In Part I, we examine whether bad outcomes during childbirth (defined as maternal mortality, an obstetric fistula or a uterine rupture) lead physicians to utilize more cesarean sections on future patients. In Part II, we examine whether bad outcomes associated with appendicitis (defined as patient death, a perforated or ruptured appendix or sepsis) lead physicians to perform more negative appendectomies (appendectomies performed when the patient did not have appendicitis) on future patients. Overall the study does not find evidence to support the claim that the availability heuristic leads physicians to overutilize medical care on future patients. However, the study does find evidence that variations in health care utilization are strongly correlated with individual physician practice patterns. The results of the study also imply that physicians' financial incentives may be a source of variation in health care utilization.