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Law and Macroeconomics is among a small number of books to explore law, regulations, and macroeconomics. Most of law and economics is focused on microeconomics. In contrast, Listokin is interested in macroeconomic policy, and especially the question of what legal and regulatory options are there to quickly respond to a crisis like the Great Depression or the recent Great Recession. To make this manageable, Listokin focuses on the role of law in confronting the 2008 financial crisis. In the economist's toolkit for confronting a recession are choices such as lowering interest rates and "quantitative easing." The law offers no such toolkit. Listokin argues that it should, especially given how modest the economic fixes have been since 2008.--

Abstract  Two prominent theories of crime (Wilson and Herrnstein 1985; Gottfredson and Hirshi 1990) rely heavily on the notion that criminals are impatient or "present‐oriented." In brief, the theories posit that present‐oriented individuals will be predisposed to crime because the "costs" of crime (e.g., prison time) lag behind crime's benefits. While the theory has intuitive appeal, it remains controversial. This study considers a data set first presented by Levitt and Venkatesh (2000) that details a drug‐selling gang's activities. In this gang, low‐ranking criminals accept low initial wages in the hope of receiving high future remunerations. As demonstrated in the note, this wage structure is exceedingly difficult to reconcile (both theoretically and empirically) with the notion of present‐oriented criminals. In sum, the study suggests that present orientation is at best an incomplete and idiosyncratic explanation of the causes of crime.