Yair Listokin ’05 to Deliver Shibley Inaugural Lecture

Yair Listokin ’05, the Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law, will deliver a lecture titled “What Happened to Macro in Law and Economics?” on November 16, 2015, at 4:30 p.m. in Room 127. The talk will be the inaugural lecture for the Shibley Family Fund Professorship.

“Macroeconomics is at least as useful as microeconomics for understanding law. But there has been very little macroeconomic analysis of law,” says Listokin.

His talk will argue that the absence of macroeconomics is a harmful historical accident. Listokin uses a macroeconomic lens to examine the Coase Theorem, cost benefit analysis by regulatory agencies, the law of remedies, public utility regulation, and corporate law.

“In many of these areas, law and macroeconomics produces very different recommendations for law than the standard law and economic analysis,” Listokin adds.

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.