Yair Listokin (Yale) speaks at the ESM

"Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Responses to Recessions"

After the economic crisis of 2008, private-sector spending took nearly a decade to recover. Yair Listokin thinks we can respond more quickly to the next meltdown by reviving and refashioning a policy approach whose proven success is too rarely acknowledged. Harking back to New Deal regulatory agencies, Listokin proposes that we take seriously law’s ability to function as a macroeconomic tool, capable of stimulating demand when needed and relieving demand when it threatens to overheat economies.

Listokin makes his case by looking at both positive and cautionary examples, going back to the New Deal and including the Keystone Pipeline, the constitutionally fraught bond-buying program unveiled by the European Central Bank at the nadir of the Eurozone crisis, the ongoing Greek crisis, and the experience of U.S. price controls in the 1970s. History has taught us that law is an unwieldy instrument of macroeconomic policy, but Listokin argues that under certain conditions it offers a vital alternative to the monetary and fiscal policy tools that stretch the legitimacy of technocratic central banks near their breaking point while leaving the rest of us waiting and wallowing.

Yair Listokin is the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His scholarship examines tax law, corporate law, and contract law from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. He is particularly interested in the interactions between law and macroeconomics. He argues that law provides an unexplored tool for stabilizing depressed economies when monetary and fiscal policy prove inadequate. Professor Listokin has been honored with a Milton Friedman Fellowship from the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and has served as a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and NYU School of Law. His research has been featured in Fortune, cnn.com, The Boston Globe, and Slate. Recent research projects include a book manuscript entitled “Law and Macroeconomics,” an examination of different methods for estimating the value of implicit government spending through the income tax code, and an empirical study of the corporate voting tendencies of mutual funds relative to other corporate shareholders.

This is an ESM research internal seminar. If you would like to attend, please write an email to ESMresearch@esm.europa.eu