My first graduate microeconomics class didn’t start with any grand theories or mathematical proofs. It started with a demonstration. The professor marched us down to a computer lab, divided us into groups of six, and had us participate in a simulated market. Amazingly, the price of the virtual commodity we were trading quickly converged to a single value and stayed ...

Banking regulators, and the lawmakers who set regulations, would make terrible comedians. Their timing is almost always way off. The most notorious example is the regulatory “streamlining” that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed in March 2008 after the financial crisis had essentially already started. But there are others, like the 2004 switch that allowed broker-dealers to pile up debt. There ...

Travis Kalanick, the Uber founder, has set up a fund to invest in companies involved in ‘large-scale job creation.’ That would seem to be right up his alley: Uber has created lots of jobs. The question, though, is whether they are the kind of jobs that benefit society or, in the final analysis, their holders. A recent academic argument advances ...