Academic

I like my academic fisticuffs as much as the next gal, and Henry Manne's recent salvo over at Truth on the Market offers a reader rich delights.  He's reacting to Eugene Fama and Kenneth French's post on the drawbacks of insider trading, and boy does Manne come out swinging.   Here's a tiny, representatively scrappy taste:

Then you repeat another of the old myths surrounding the topic of insider trading:  that allowing it will create a further managerial moral hazard since it will give an incentive to top managers (who I presume are supposed to be able to manage this mischief without anyone else knowing about it?weird) to produce bad news rather than good news.  There is not, in the entire enormous literature on the topic, one iota of evidence for this statement, although some law professors, who are generally better at making arguments for a legal brief than they are at doing rigorous economics, may still mouth it.

As a bonus, it's framed as a letter, so you feel like you're eavesdropping on a spat between really smart people.