Paola Conconi
Paola Conconi is a Professor of Economics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, a member of the European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics (ECARES) and Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She is also a Research Fellow of the CEPR International Trade and Regional Economics Program, the Director of the CEPR Research Network on Global Value Chains, Trade and Development, and a CESifo Research Fellow. She has published in several leading journals including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Journal of Political Economy. Her main research interests are in international trade, firm organization, and political economy.
Antitrust and Competition
Lobbying for Globalization: How the Winners Dominate the Politics of Trade Agreements
Lobbying on free trade agreements has been dominated by a few very large firms, which experience large gains as a result of...
Regulatory Capture
Guns and Votes: The Victory of an Intense Minority Against an Apathetic Majority
This column on the "gun-control paradox"—the fact that gun regulations continually fail in the US Congress despite being supported by around 90 percent of...
Latest news
Commentary
Reregulate.
Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.
Antitrust and Competition
A World With Far Fewer Mergers
Brooke Fox and Walter Frick analyze research and ideas presented at the Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference that question the value of mergers.
Commentary
The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies
The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.
Antitrust and Competition
The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines
A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...
Antitrust and Competition
Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market
While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.
Antitrust and Competition
The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp
In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.
Book Excerpts
The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project
In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.
