Luigi Zingales

Luigi Zingales is the Robert C. Mc Cormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago - Booth School of Business. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute. His research interests span from corporate governance to financial development, from political economy to the economic effects of culture. He has published extensively in the major economics and financial journals. In 2003, Zingales received the Bernacer Prize for the best European young financial economist. In 2013 he has been named founding director of the Center for Economic Analysis of the PCAOB. In 2014 he served as President of the American Finance Association. He is co-author with Raghuram G. Rajan of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” (2003) and author of “A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity” (2012). His latest book is “Europa o no” (2014).

Destabilizing Digital “Bank Walks”

Bank regulators have always assumed that bank deposits are ‘sticky,’ but the advent of digital banking is changing that. New research focuses...

Bethany and Luigi’s 2022 Book Recommendations

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

Shareholder Democracy Doesn’t Work. Here’s How It Can.

An opinion piece by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales describes how a new voting mechanism could help individual investors persuade companies to...

Antitrust Enforcement, Inflation and Corporate Greed: What do we know?

At a recent Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) event, panelists, including the Stigler Center's own Luigi Zingales, reflected on the roles...

The Mechanisms of Regulatory Capture

To mark the 50-year anniversary of George Stigler’s seminal piece, “The Theory of Economic Regulation” we are publishing a new eBook examining...

A Call for Comments: Have You Been Affected by Academic Gatekeeping?

On Friday, ProMarket published a piece by Renée Adams about the impact of academic gatekeeping in political finance. Do you have a...

The Incoming Currency War

Four powerful forces—cryptocurrencies, the decoupling of geographical and monetary boundaries, ad-based digital platforms’ foray into the world of payments, and the value...

Economic Regulation After George Stigler

George Stigler’s “The Theory of Economic Regulation” has left a lasting impact on the academic and real-world practice of regulatory policy. Fifty...

The Silent Coup

President Donald Trump's seditious actions are exposing the political power that Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook enjoy. Banning him from their...

How Pfizer’s Vaccine Announcement Demonstrates the Political Power of Firms

By timing the disclosure of the results of its vaccine trial, Pfizer could have influenced the 2020 presidential election. This is worrisome...

Latest news

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.

Why the Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is a Mess for Consumers

Grocers Kroger and Albertsons want to merge, which would make them the second biggest retail food chain and, according to them, enhance their ability to compete with Walmart and Costco and offer lower prices to consumers. Christine P. Bartholomew writes that the promises of more competition and lower prices for consumers are unlikely to manifest, and thus the Federal Trade Commission should block the deal.  

After Neoliberalism

The following is an excerpt from Martin Daunton's new book, "The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023," out November 14.