In a new book by Hoover Institution senior fellow Stephen Haber and Charles Calomiris, Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit, the authors argue that bargains made between politicians, bankers, bank shareholders, depositors, debtors, and taxpayers—as much as economic conditions—lead to banking crises. In their book, they write “the politics we see operating everywhere else around us determines whether societies suffer repeated banking crises … or never suffer banking crises.”

Hoover fellow Terry Anderson, the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow and executive director of PERC (the Property and Environment Research Center), and PERC associate Sarah Anderson, discuss the motivating forces behind the Forest Service’s fuel management policy. Although most people think of fire suppression when considering wildlife management, the Andersons focus their research on fire prevention strategies, as practiced by the Forest Service.

In a New York Times article entitled “The Water Fight That Inspired ‘Chinatown,’” journalist Felicity Barringer discussed the Owens Valley water project that siphoned water from the Owens River east of the Sierra Nevada to fuel the growing city of Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. This project inspired the 1974 film Chinatown. Gary Libecap, Hoover research fellow and cochair of the John and Jean De Nault Task Force on Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity, had written about the project in his 2007 book Owens Valley Revisited: A Reassessment of the West's First Great Water Transfer.

F. Scott Kieff, the Ray and Louis Knowles Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, member of the John and Jean De Nault Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force, and a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC, was recently elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for his work in the fields of the social sciences, law, and economics. “The Academy promotes transnational dialogue and visionary developments of new scientific knowledge and academic thinking, and has more than 1,500 world-renowned members, 28 of whom have received Nobel Prizes.”