This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 10th, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

States varied widely and how they handled wildly changing prices during the pandemic.

So what do those differences tell us about the effects of policies meant to crack down on so-called

price gouging?

Gavin Roberts is a professor of economics at Weber State University.

We spoke in Dallas and March. Careful listeners of the Cato Daily Podcast will know we talk occasionally about

price gouging, especially during the pandemic and it's sort of pernicious effects on people's

preferences or willingness to buy more than they otherwise might.

You know, anybody who studies economics knows that when

their supply and demand are way out of whack and there is uncertainty and prices

are allowed to rise and fall. People buy less of essential goods than they

might otherwise purchase. We saw people during the early days of the pandemic buying toilet paper in very large quantities.

And you know if prices were allowed to rise and fall in a lot of those places,

maybe they wouldn't have hoarded and of course they were hoarding unnecessarily,

but in the short time frame it was a difficult moment, people didn't really know what to do,

but we know that price gouging has some pretty pernicious effects on people

and when you need essential goods you really need them.

So the pandemic also offers economists an opportunity. We don't like to look

necessarily at silver linings of terrible events, but to the extent that there was a

silver lining, economists got a lot of data because a lot of states did widely varying things with

respect to trying to control prices during this very uncertain moment so not to

call you morbid, but it is it is something that economists say

...