Wealth of Nations
The long-standing bipartisan consensus for free trade has unraveled in recent years, as both parties turn toward the failed policies of protectionism. But that’s as much of a mistake now as it ever was, as Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon explain in “The (Updated) Case for Free Trade,” Cato Policy Analysis no. 925), reviewing and rebutting the popular but misguided arguments against letting goods freely cross borders.

Time Warp, Again
The effect of the minimum wage has been an important topic of debate for decades, with economists and policymakers arguing about the size and direction of the policy’s effects. One underappreciated way the law can hurt workers is not only through unemployment but through subtler effects, such as how many hours employees are provided. In “Evidence of the Unintended Labor Scheduling Implications of the Minimum Wage,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 296, Qiuping Yu, Shawn Mankad, and Masha Shunko demonstrate that minimum wage increases can have a dramatic negative effect on the number of hours worked per employee.

Climate Rules
Climate policies are highly fragmented across various jurisdictions. Using California’s cap and trade policy as a case study, Söhnke M. Bartram, Kewei Hou, and Sehoon Kim tease out the effects on individual firm behavior and whether the law is working as intended in “Real Effects of Climate Policy: Financial Constraints and Spillovers,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 291. They find that the costs of the policy exceed the negligible reductions in emissions it produces.

Meet the New Boss …
Despite campaigning on a return to multilateralism, President Biden has instead largely embraced the failed Trump policies of unilateralism and protectionism in trade. Despite the calmer rhetoric, the substance of anti-trade policies remains largely unchanged, and few tariffs have been rolled back. But it’s not too late to turn that around, notes James Bacchus in “Biden and Trade at Year One: The Reign of Polite Protectionism,” Cato Policy Analysis no. 926.

Melting Myths
The melting of Himalayan glaciers has long prompted environmentalists and others to sound the alarm. But both the actual rate of melting and the consequences on the source of major rivers such as the Ganges have been overstated, and the actual rate of melting is much more gradual, according to Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar and Vijay K. Raina in “False Alarm over the Retreat of the Himalayan Glaciers,” Cato Policy Analysis no. 927.

Trial and Error
What drives policy experimentation and innovation? Shaoda Wang and David Y. Yang examine the history of policy changes in China since the 1980s to try to determine what motivates political actors and policymakers within the one-party state in “Policy Experimentation in China: The Political Economy of Policy Learning,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 294.

Go Fish
In Chile, the endangered fish species hake is not allowed to be caught or sold during the month of September, when hake reproduce. Counterintuitively, frequent enforcement audits might actually hinder the effectiveness of this policy by providing greater opportunities to learn and adapt, perfecting evasion techniques. Instead, fewer and random audits actually provide a stronger incentive for compliance. That’s the conclusion of “Slippery Fish: Enforcing Regulation under Subversive Adaptation,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 292, by Andres Gonzalez‐​Lira and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak.

Tip Your Waiter
Tip credits allow employers to pay less than the minimum wage so long as the difference is more than made up for in tips received by workers. Eliminating this policy is a goal of many who are also seeking to raise the minimum wage, but the negative employment effects of such a policy are real, as shown in “The Employment and Redistributive Effects of Reducing or Eliminating Minimum Wage Tip Credits,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 293, by David Neumark and Maysen Yen.

Crypto Congress
As cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have become more popular, members of Congress have become increasingly concerned about whether they might threaten the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. To the contrary, the coexistence of cryptocurrencies is beneficial to the dollar. Nicholas Anthony explains why in “Congress Should Welcome Cryptocurrency Competition,” Cato Briefing Paper no. 138.

Disincentivized Capitalism
The regulatory burdens on publicly traded companies is immense and has been growing. An important explanation for the significant decline in the number of publicly listed companies in the United States is the increased burden of disclosure and governance regulations, as explained by Michael Ewens, Kairong Xiao, and Ting Xu in “The Regulatory Costs of Being Public,” Cato Research Brief in Economic Policy no. 295.