Asher Schechter

ProMarket's former deputy managing editor. As a journalist, he has mostly covered issues related to the intersection between politics and the economy, such as antitrust, corruption, lobbying and social movements. Prior to joining the Stigler center, he worked for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz-TheMarker, where he was a senior features writer and still writes as a political columnist. He is the author of Rothschild: The Story of a Protest Movement (2012, Hakibbutz Hameuhad-Sifriat Poalim Publishing Group), a nonfiction book covering Israel’s social protests of 2011, and a World Economic Forum Global Shaper (New York Hub). He previously hosted The Cost of Doing Business, a twice-weekly podcast about business and economics in Israel. You can follow him on Twitter at @asherschechter.

Is More Antitrust the Answer to Rising Wealth Inequality?

University of Michigan professor Daniel Crane: “The story that somehow antitrust law is dead, that it’s been killed, is wrong. It hasn’t. It’s very...

New Study Finds Evidence That Rents Might Be Higher in the U.S. than in Europe

A new paper by Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver from the Peterson Institute for International Economics explores the origins of the world’s billionaires, and...

ProMarket Interview: “The Lobbyists and the Regulators Were Really, Socially and Culturally, the Same People”

University of Connecticut’s law professor James Kwak explains the mechanisms that drive cultural capture, and why he think it is less prevalent today. In his...

Are Business Schools Responsible For Strengthening Ethical Norms Among Students and Alumni?

A panel at Fordham University discusses the social signals business schools communicate to students. Are business schools partly to blame if their alumni engage in...

How to End Too-Big-To-Fail? At Minneapolis Fed Symposium, Participants Reject Big Bank Breakup

Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke: "Size is not the only relevant attribute of banks.” Should big banks be broken up in order to ensure the...

Alan Rusbridger: “The Level of Scrutiny That the Press Would Apply to its Own Failures is Minimal”

ProMarket interview: Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, on media capture. In 2003, Rebekah Wade (now Brooks), the former editor of the British tabloid...

Why Most Boards Fail

A Stigler Center panel debate examines the impact of activist shareholders and the role of dissenting board members. Corporate governance has seen some substantial reforms...

ProMarket Interview: Robert J. Shiller on Competition, Deception and Rent-Seeking

Yale economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Robert J. Shiller explains why competition in itself does not always weed out deception and rent-seeking. “Our free-market system...

ProMarket Graph: Is There a Correlation Between Perception Measures and Reported Levels of Corruption?

New graph compares corruption perception indexes with reported cases of corruption.  What is the best way to measure corruption, and can there be a reliable way to...

What Makes M&A Reporters More Accurate?

A study by Kenneth R. Ahern and Denis Sosyura ranks M&A reporters based on their accuracy. Rumors and speculation have always been a part of...

Latest news

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.

Debating the Draft Merger Guidelines: Transcript

On September 7, the Stigler Center hosted a webinar to discuss the draft merger guidelines. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of the event.

Holding Up the News

Meta has silenced news organizations’ social media accounts in response to Canada’s Online News Act, a law not yet in effect. Josh Braun describes the reasoning behind such legislation, its potential flaws, and how Meta, particularly Facebook, has turned the Canadian wildfire crisis into a regulatory pressure campaign.