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Bethany McLean

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a columnist for Yahoo Finance, and a contributor to CNBC. Her 2001 Fortune piece, “Is Enron Overpriced?,” was one of the first skeptical articles about the company. After Enron collapsed into bankruptcy, she co-authored (with Peter Elkind) The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. She is also the author of All the Devils Are Here (with Joe Nocera), Shaky Ground, and Saudi America. Along with Luigi Zingales, she co-hosts the Podcast Capitalisn't.
Commentary

Bethany and Luigi’s 2022 Book Recommendations

Capitalisn't hosts Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean offer their recommended books from 2022 for ProMarket readers.
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Media

How Should We Finance Higher Education If Not Through Student Debt? A New Capitalisn’t Episode

In a new episode of Capitalisn’t, Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean take a look at the student debt crisis: How did we...
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Nursing Homes, the World’s Largest Pension Fund, and Our Make-Believe Economy

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 
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Commentary

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Wirecard, Women in the Workplace, and Social Safety Nets

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Joe Biden, Private Equity, and Addictive Social Media

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: The Fed, the Google Antitrust Case, and Covid Bankruptcies

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Economists, Corporate Giveaways, and Elon Musk

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Insider Trading, Central Banking, and the Fall of the CDC

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean. 
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Media

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Friedman, 50 Years Later Edition

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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Covid-19

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Inequality, Remote Learning and the First Female Recession

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
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Latest news

Antitrust and Competition

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Steven Salop
Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.
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Antitrust and Competition

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Robin Mamrak
Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.
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Antitrust and Competition

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

John Kwoka
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.
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Economic History

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

Cyril Hédoin, Alexandre Chirat
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.
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Antitrust and Competition

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

Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, Anna Toldrà-Simats
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.
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Antitrust and Competition

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

Joshua Gray, Cristian Santesteban
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.
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Commentary

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

David Ennis
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.
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ProMarket is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Policy.

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