Yale Press Release says
Professor Listokin received the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for best first book, Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies to Recessions (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Established in 2004 to recognize the distinguished legacy of two former directors of the MacMillan Center, the prizes is awarded for books on international topics written by current members of the Yale faculty. Award recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center and a $10,000 research award over two years.
Yair Listokin is the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He has been honored with a Milton Friedman Fellowship from the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and his research has been featured in several major media outlets.
Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies 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.
For more information about the MacMillan Center and its International Book Prizes, visit its website.
