Isabella M. Weber
Isabella M. Weber is an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Research Leader for China at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate is the winner of the Joan Robinson Prize 2021 and the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award and has been recommended on best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, ProMarket and Folha de S.Paulo among others. For her work on the rise of economics in China’s recent history she has won the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade and the Warren Samuels Prize for Interdisciplinary Research in History of Economic Thought and Methodology. Previously she was a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. Isabella holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and was a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University. German born, she studied at the Free University of Berlin and Peking University for her B.A.
Economic History
How China Became a Global Economic Powerhouse Through an Idiosyncratic Approach to Market Capitalism
Chinese reformers after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 agreed that it was necessary for China to move towards marketization, but...
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Antitrust and Competition
AI For the Antitrust Regulator
Cary Coglianese lays out the potential, and the considerations, for antitrust regulators to use machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.
Antitrust and Competition
Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent
On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.
Event Notes
ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly
The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.
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...
