In a recent article, Kate M. Conlow explores how feeble requirements among the American academic economics community to disclose conflicts of interest are compromising research and harming policymaking.
Last month, Senators Chuck Grassley and Tina Smith proposed the Livestock Consolidation Research Act to study the economic impact of concentration in the beef packing industry. This followed on the heels of President Donald Trump’s call in November 2025 for the Department of Justice to investigate the persistent concentration and pricing issues in the United States beef sector. The directive responded to rising beef prices at grocery stores, declining payments to cattle ranchers, and public concern over the market power of the “Big Four”—JBS, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and National Beef—which together control 85% of U.S. beef processing.
The problems Trump’s directive identified are not new. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) commissioned a group of academic economists from land-grant universities to study many of these same concerns. The result was a 200-page report that largely downplayed the market power of the Big Four, concluded that concentration was not a primary driver of the sector’s pricing problems, and, as others have observed, ultimately defended the status quo. Undermining the report’s conclusions was a serious ethical problem: several contributors to the USDA study had ties to the very industry they were evaluating.
This episode is not unique, but rather captures a broader problem in economics. Economists with university appointments routinely have significant influence over law and public policy, while also working for the very firms and industries affected by their research, testimony, and advice. Compounding this, and unlike peer disciplines such as law and medicine, economics has slim ethics and disclosure rules that address such conflicts. Lawyers, for example, must complete an ethics course and exam, followed by standards enforced by state courts, public licensing and oversight bodies, bar associations, and even attorneys general. Despite the significant impact of work in the economics field, similar ethical limitations are not in place for economists. In a recent article published by the Arizona State Law Journal, I examine the consequences of these conflicts for law and policymaking, and what we can do to fix it.
Why academic economists’ conflicts of interest matter
Academic economists occupy a particularly influential position in law and policymaking. Agencies hire them to provide expert insight and advise on policy. Legislators call on them to testify in congressional hearings. And their scholarship, media appearances, and op-eds also shape public debate.
At the same time, some academic economists also work with private firms and industry associations. Companies frequently hire them as consultants or expert witnesses—opportunities that can be both career-enhancing and highly lucrative. In some subfields, research shows that relationships between academic economists and industry are especially common. For example, one study found that nearly 80% of academic financial economists had “worked in some capacity with private institutions.” In addition to paid positions, academic economists may seek to curry favor with industry to obtain proprietary datasets, which University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales has explained “can make a researcher’s career.”
These relationships with industry can impact academic economists’ research in several ways. Studies show that funding tends to influence how academics select a research question, collect data, and interpret and present their findings. Additionally, when funding comes from a private source, research outcomes favor the institution providing funding, likely driven by selection biases or a fear of defunding.
Non-financial incentives have also been shown to yield biased outcomes: research based on proprietary data frequently aligns with the private interests. Indeed, when companies share proprietary datasets with economists, there is often an explicit or implicit agreement that the resulting scholarship will be tailored to the interests of the firm. Additionally, Zingales has explained that certain publication incentives can reinforce pressures to produce business-friendly research. Publication is essential to achieve tenure, and research shows that pro-business findings are published more frequently—in part because of the preferences of journal editors and referees, who are frequently successful tenured economists and may work in some capacity for industry. Because of this, academic economists, and especially those seeking tenure, may write more favorably toward private interests to increase their odds of publication in highly competitive journals. Combined, these characteristics can reward work that aligns with private interests.
How industry ties shape research
The consequences of academic economists’ conflicts of interest extend beyond simply undermining the integrity of their scholarship. Biased research can influence the policies and laws that policymakers adopt—in some cases leading to broader economic harms.
One high-profile example, reported on extensively by ProMarket and other news outlets, involved an Uber lobbying campaign that sought to influence governments to adopt laws and regulations friendly to ridesharing companies. At the time, many were pushing to regulate Uber in a manner similar to taxis, while others were scrutinizing the company’s labor practices. As part of Uber’s campaign, the company paid academic economists hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce research and publish articles that supported the company’s deregulatory policy agenda. Later, the biased scholarship was shown to have played a role in policymakers’ rejection of the regulations that Uber objected to.
A similar dynamic emerged around the 2008 financial crisis. Several prominent academic economists who helped shape financial policies that contributed to the Great Recession or its aftermath were also working for firms and industry associations that benefitted from them.
Economics as an ethics outlier
The role of academic economists in the Great Recession was damaging enough to the field’s credibility that the American Economic Association (AEA), the discipline’s leading academic society in the U.S., adopted a disclosure policy for its journals. Soon after, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) followed the AEA’s lead, adopting a similar policy. Years later, in the late 2010s, the AEA added a code of ethics—a long overdue step that arrived more than a century after fields like law and medicine began adopting professional ethics and disclosure policies. But the economic associations’ measures leave much to be desired: the disclosure policy for the journals published by the AEA appear more ministerial than mandatory, and unlike at most journals, authors’ disclosures are buried in a separate document that readers must download from the website as a zipped file. Even where there are financial interests, authors are only required to disclose payments exceeding $10,000 from a source over the course of the preceding three years. For its part, the AAEA’s journals do not seem to reliably follow its disclosure policy, a point discussed further in my article.
Economics is too influential in law and policymaking to continue on as an ethics outlier. Economics research influences everything from health, housing, and food policy to protections for retail investors and tech regulation. Academic economists should fully disclose their conflicts of interest not only in journals, but also in media appearances, congressional testimony, and agency proceedings. But disclosure, while necessary, is not enough on its own. Government bodies should adopt more robust procedures to screen for conflicts prior to working with academic economists in advisory or contract roles, and academic economists should always disclose conflicts in public-facing work like the USDA study on concentration in beef processing. Additionally, the economics profession itself should adopt a more comprehensive code of ethics backed by meaningful enforcement.
In short, if academic economists want to continue assuming positions that influence public outcomes, they need to also accept the ethical obligations that come with that role.
Author Disclosure: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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