We investigate whether food price subsidies affect household nutrition using a dramatic expansion of the availability of subsidized rice in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh in the early 2000's. Households in Chhattisgarh improved their nutritional intake relative to households in districts bordering the state as the availability of subsidized rice expanded. This increase is driven by households most likely to be eligible for rice subsidies, and we do not find evidence that households least likely to be eligible changed their diet. These results differ from recent studies suggesting that food subsidies may have little effect on nutrition.

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Bank regulation used to be riddled with price, product, entry, and location restrictions. Such restrictions were intended to prevent the recurrence of crises, such as those of the 1930s and 1940s. Over time, however, regulatory acquiescence to technological and institutional innovation undermined their ability to limit competition. An intellectual turn toward valorizing competition also hastened their demise. George Stigler, in particular, provided a trenchant critique of all such regulation as the product of pure rent seeking by private industry. This Article revisits the role of such restrictions on competition in banking. On the one hand, the public choice account of these restrictions as the outcome of private rent seeking is essentially true. On the other hand, their unintended historical result was to limit banks' risk-taking incentives and to coopt banks into preventing regulatory arbitrage. Viewed from this perspective, these restrictions provide an important legal, political, and economic (LPE) model for how limits on competition could usefully complement current bank regulation. This model is one in which, to some extent, regulation facilitates rather than frustrates cartel formation in order to maintain a more stable equilibrium.