Twenty students from leading universities from around the country and from around the world arrived at the Hoover Institution on July 31 for the third annual Hoover IP2 Summer Teaching Institute on the Economics and Politics of Regulation (STI). The STI is an intensive two-week program designed to teach budding policy makers how to apply evidence and scientific reasoning to writing legislation, creating regulations, and adjudicating disputes that arise relating to property rights.
The STI emphasizes the crucial role that governments play in establishing, delimiting, and enforcing property rights as a public policy tool. Students participate in a series of seminars on antitrust, regulation, competition, energy and environmental issues, mergers and acquisitions, financial markets, intellectual property rights and innovation, and international trade.
Students in the 2016 class are from eight different countries. They include Capitol Hill staff, law clerks to federal judges, federal agency staff, and law and public policy graduate students. They will be taught by economics, political science, business school, and law school professors from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, George Mason University, George Washington University, the Naval Postgraduate School, New York University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Washington.
Hoover IP2 director Stephen Haber said, “This is the third year that we have run the STI. The past programs have been very successful. The students have returned to their jobs and schools with a better understanding of property rights systems and with a new appreciation of the interdependencies of economics, politics, and the law when analyzing and proposing legislation and regulations.”
Haber added that “we are pleased with what we have accomplished but we are not standing still. This year we are offering a new session on how the US patent system facilitates start-up firms.” Convened by Hoover fellow Richard Sousa, the panel will include Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who will share their expertise and experiences in building innovative companies on the basis of strong intellectual property rights.
Students live in Stanford University housing and have the opportunity to extend their days in lively, unplanned evening conversations with their peers and new colleagues. One 2015 student wrote that “I anticipate that the network may be most beneficial aspect” of the program. Another wrote, “Our discussions are extremely stimulating and often continue late into the evenings. It is almost certain that many excellent ideas will emerge from this collaboration and inspire our work long after the program is over.”
The Summer Teaching Institute is one component of the efforts of the Hoover Institute Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity, which seeks to create a theoretically informed and empirically sound scholarly literature on property rights and public policy and to disseminate the findings of that literature to the larger public and the policy making-community.
