Are We Ready for the Next Recession? A Review of Yair Listokin’s Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies to Recessions

Authors

David H. Webber, Boston University School of LawFollow

Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

1-4-2021

ISSN

2219-7117

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Language

en-US

Abstract

“Are we ready for the next recession?” That question haunts and motivates Yair Listokin’s new book, LAW AND MACROECONOMICS: LEGAL REMEDIES TO RECESSIONS (Harvard Press 2019). If the response to the Great Recession of 2007–08 is any indication, the answer may be no. According to Listokin, the traditional tools for combating economic downturns—fiscal and monetary policy—appear decreasingly effective in stimulating “aggregate demand”, the key to economic revival.1 Listokin’s ambitious project is to propose a third channel for economic reinvigoration: law, or to use his preferred term, “expansionary legal policy.”2 Listokin, a Yale law professor and economist,3 argues for expansionary legal policy as a third, overlooked tool distinct from monetary and fiscal policy that policymakers should deploy to fight recessions.4

Recommended Citation

David H. Webber, Are We Ready for the Next Recession? A Review of Yair Listokin’s Law and Macroeconomics: Legal Remedies to Recessions , in 22 Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 10 (2021).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/1359