Cato Journal

The Cato Journal—America’s leading free‐market public policy journal—ran from 1981 to 2021. Every issue is a valuable resource for scholars concerned with questions of public policy, yet written and edited to be accessible to the interested lay reader. Clive Crook of The Economist has called it “the most consistently interesting and provocative journal of its kind.”

The Cato Journal’s stable of writers include a veritable Who’s Who in business, government, and academia. Past contributors include James M. Buchanan, Richard Epstein, Ben Bernanke, Robert Higgs, Václav Klaus, Justin Yifu Lin, Allan H. Meltzer, Charles Murray, William Niskanen, Douglass C. North, José Piñera, Anna J. Schwartz, John B. Taylor, and Lawrence H. White.

2,108 results found

Fall 2021
Cato Journal

Covid Cash
Should strong demand for paper currency be considered an unalloyed benefit in the helicopter money era? Many treasuries and central banks around the world seem to think so.
By Kenneth Rogoff and Jessica Scazzero
Fall 2021
Cato Journal

The GameStop Episode: What Happened and What Does It Mean?
Robinhood is heir to a half-century evolution making equity trading cheap and accessible to the nonprofessional public in the United States and other countries.
By Allan M. Malz
Fall 2021
Cato Journal

The Impact of Public Debt on Economic Growth
This article explains how studies were identified for the survey sample, provides an overview of the theories of how public debt impacts economic growth, reviews the findings of the 40 studies in the survey sample, and concludes with some recommendations for future research.
By Jack Salmon
Fall 2021
Cato Journal

GameStop and the Rise of Retail Trading
Easily compared to a law school issue-spotter exam question, or perhaps a Rorschach test, the GameStop phenomenon has raised questions and concerns regarding equity markets from just about every angle imaginable.
By Jennifer J. Schulp
Fall 2021
Cato Journal

Editor’s Note
Although the Cato Journal is being sunset, it will continue to be available online and serve as a valuable research tool for years to come.
By James A. Dorn
Fall 2021
Cato Journal

U.S. Debt Sustainability under Low Interest Rates and after the Covid-19 Shock
The reason for the receptiveness to large spending has been the perception that the fiscal stimulus in the Great Recession of 2007–2009 erred on the side of excessive caution and left an aftermath of unduly slow growth.
By William R. Cline
Cato Journal

Vol. 41 No. 3
Fall 2021
The Cato Institute has announced that the Fall 2021 edition of the Cato Journal, one of its longest‐running projects, will be the final publication. For more than forty years, the Cato Journal has provided clear analysis of the most significant policy challenges facing the country, and done so free of political favor to either side.
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

Recovering the Liberal Spirit: Nietzsche, Individuality, and Spiritual Freedom
Defenders of the liberal project have typically responded by doubling down on the twin benefits of wealth and choice.
By Aaron Ross Powell
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Many Americans prioritized Rome’s example over Greece, but Thomas Jefferson stood out because of his unique commitment to Greek ideas, rejecting the Ciceronianism of people like Adams.
By Paul Meany
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations
By Thomas A. Hemphill
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It
By treating this loss of narrative control as inevitable, Stengel abdicates responsibility for his own failure to respond appropriately to his mistake and Russian attempts to seize upon it.
By Will Duffield
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

Lessons for the Fed from the Pandemic
Despite the serious costs of the pandemic, the responses to it have reduced costly government regulations and speeded up the development of vaccines via the private sector and encouraged new technologies.
By John A. Allison
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

Which Type of Digital Currency for Financial Inclusion?
America’s financial inclusion problem is usually expressed as the percentage of households — 5.4 percent at last count, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC 2020: 1) — who lack a bank account.
By Diego Zuluaga
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

Chartering the Fintech Future
With respect to technological changes, new methods for providing loans and payment services by “shadow banks,” especially by fintech banks over the past several years, are accelerating the long‐term trend of financial disintermediation from chartered banking by providing more attractive alternatives to customers.
By Charles Calomiris
Spring/Summer 2021
Cato Journal

A Reckoning Looms for America’s 50-Year Financial Surveillance System
[A]fter 50 years of the BSA, let’s try to measure its effectiveness.
By Michael J. Casey