5 Quotes by Richard Schragger

That being said, it may be that opponents of bailouts are not worried about public officials' behavior at all. Perhaps the strategic behavior that we are trying to avoid is on the lender's side, not on the government's. A standard objection to bailouts is that investors anticipating a bailout will be too aggressive in extending credit. They too have a potential moral hazard that needs to be remedied.

Local and state tax incentives are much less visible because they do not constitute a direct charge to local budgets and are often paid for by future generations through municipal debt. This relative invisibility makes it much less probable that the local political process can be counted on to prevent bad incentive deals.

If geographically uneven economic development is a deep feature of economies on all scales, as economic geographers tell us, then the existence of leading and lagging economies will be a long-term feature of the landscape. And competition will merely exacerbate the shift of productive enterprise to leading places, generate unproductive races to the bottom, or induce lagging cities to give up altogether.

Inter-jurisdictional competition for growth can and does lead to potentially misplaced investments - stadiums instead of schools, highways instead of health care. There is nothing intrinsic about the mark in jurisdictions that ensures that it will produce the right kind of spending, even if we knew that that spending was.

One of the first modern American clawback provisions was adopted by New Haven over twenty years ago. Now twenty states and over on hundred cities have clawback provisions.