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During times of economic crises, the public policy response is to abandon basic economic thinking and engage in “emergency economic” policies. We explore how the current financial crisis was in part caused by previous emergency economic measures. We then investigate the theoretical limitations of emergency economic responses. We argue that these responses fail to take into consideration the practical conditions of politics, thereby making them unsuitable to remedy the problems of a crisis. Lastly, we provide a preliminary analysis of the consequences resulting from emergency economic policies initiated in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

This introduction summarizes each of the papers in Studies in Austrian Macroeconomics. It begins with a brief overview of the core ideas and development of modern Austrian macroeconomics, focusing on its theory of the business cycle. The papers are then discussed by parts, starting with the papers on Austrian monetary and business cycle theory, followed by those addressing the relationship between the US and Canadian economic performance, and concluding with the three papers on the political economy of regulation and crisis.

The Austrian School of Economics, pioneered in the late nineteenth century by Menger and developed in the twentieth century by Mises and Hayek, is poised to make significant contributions to the methodology, analytics, and social philosophy of economics and political economy in the twenty-first century. But it can only do so if its practitioners accept responsibility to pursue the approach to its logical conclusions with confidence and absence of fear, and with an attitude of open inquiry, acceptance of their own fallibility, and a desire to track truth and offer social understanding. The reason the Austrian school is so well positioned to do this is because (1) it embraces its role as a human science, (2) it does not shy away from public engagement, (3) it takes a humble stance, (4) it seeks to be practical, and (5) there remains so much evolutionary potential to the ideas at the methodological, analytical, and social philosophical level that would challenge the conventional wisdom in economics, political science, sociology, history, law, business, and philosophy. The author explores these five tenants of Austrian economics as a response to the comments on his lead chapter “What Is Still Wrong with the Austrian School of Economics?”

The purpose is to assess the impact of online platforms on the sex industry, focusing specifically on direct sex work, and evaluate what approaches to platform regulation is likely to align with the interests of sex workers.

The paper presents a review of interdisciplinary conceptual and empirical literature on sex work combined with analysis of key issues using a transaction cost framework.

Online platforms generally make sex work safer. Regulation aimed at preventing platforms from serving sex workers is likely to harm their welfare.

Regulation of online platforms should take great care to differentiate coercive sex from consensual sex work, and allow sex workers to experiment with governance mechanisms provided by entrepreneurs.

The paper demonstrates how a transactions costs approach to market behaviour as applied to personal services like ridesharing can also shed light on the challenges that sex workers face, partly as a result of criminalisation, and the dangers of over-regulation.

The aim of this research is to contribute to the existing literature about the entrepreneurial conditions in crowd-based contexts by describing how different European countries regulate equity crowdfunding market in order to incentive the investments and protect investors.

Based on a legal acts' analysis, we conduct a qualitative study comparing the crowdfunding regulation addressed to investors. In particular, we focus our analysis on the European countries with the highest concentration of crowdfunding platforms (i.e. the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain).

The results show that some countries, such as the UK, Germany and France, present an investor-oriented approach based on non-restrictive regulation, while other countries, such as Spain and Italy, have a restrictive approach that protects investors excessively and discourages them. In particular, the case study of France shows how the introduction of unrestricted regulation can produce positive effects on the volume of crowdfunding transactions.

The paper is addressed to investors, policymakers and intermediaries (platforms) to help the first in orienting themselves between the different crowdfunding regulations and the latter in aligning and orchestrating rules and norms.

This is the first study that analyses the role of investor-oriented regulations in the promotion of entrepreneurship through the identification of four key factors to monitor equity crowdfunding regulations.

The coming use of autonomous vehicles has kindled an extensive debate over the choice of a desirable liability regime. This article contributes to that debate by explaining how rules for liability and damages ought to be constructed to deal first with stranger (including highway) cases and then with consensual cases (like medical malpractice). It concludes that an output regime based on events as they unfold is applicable in the former but not in the latter. It then argues that this legal regime carries over without a hitch to autonomous vehicles. It then further notes that in private disputes there are no fixed rules for deciding how to mix rules for injunctions and liabilities for threatened harms, and further notes that the regulatory regime for IoT will face those same difficulties, which are best solved by trying to minimize the sum of Type I and Type II errors, as in other cases.

Legal reasoning/analysis.

One salient point is that the rules of the road should change in response to technical innovation, but liability rules should not. The sound approach for dealing with damages for past incidents ought to be constructed to deal first with stranger (including highway) cases in which there is a dichotomous decision on compliance or not. That regime is based on events as they unfold, and carries over without a hitch to autonomous vehicles. For dealing with the prevention of future harms from violation of these rules, by contrast, there are no fixed rules for deciding how to mix damages with injunction, and the substitution of a system of direct state enforcement faces the same difficulties of implementation. In both settings, the rules of the road should be held constant, after which the ideal remedial mix follows the traditional approach of trying to minimize the sum of Type I and Type II errors, relating to over and underenforcement. The basic rules of tort liability stand in contrast to the different standards of liability that arise in consensual situations, and in all cases, they must necessarily be supplemented by rules of vicarious and product liability. Overall, the bottom line is this: autonomous vehicle innovations are relevant to designing regulations for future and uncertain harms, but irrelevant to liability for past harms.

This is an original legal analysis on the topic of Autonomous Vehicles.

Our central thesis is that the dynamic, immersive and agile nature of extended reality (XR) both provides an unusually fertile ground for the development of alternative forms of governance and essentially necessitates this development by contrast with relatively inagile institutions of public governance.

I take an epistemologically aware, systems-theoretic perspective in my analysis to properly tease out the relevant micro-, meso- and macro-structures; their direct interactions; and their entanglements.

The challenges presented by rapidly advancing XR may require much more agile forms of governance than are available from public institutions, even under widespread algorithmic governance. Social entrepreneurship in blockchain solutions may very well be able to meet some of these challenges, as we show.

There are very few systems-aware, epistemological analyses of social entrepreneurship utilizing algorithms versus public algorithmic governance and none that focus on how these two channels of social action interact with developments in XR.