Mehrsa Baradaran

Mehrsa Baradaran is a professor of law at UCI Law. Previously, she was the Robert Cotten Alston Chair in Corporate Law and Associate Dean for strategic initiatives with a focus on diversity and inclusion efforts and national and international faculty scholarship recognition at the University of Georgia School of Law. Baradaran writes about banking law, financial inclusion, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. Her scholarship includes the books How the Other Half Banks and The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, both published by the Harvard University Press. The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap was awarded the Best Book of the Year by the Urban Affairs Association, the PROSE Award Honorable Mention in the Business, Finance & Management category. Baradaran was also selected as a finalist at the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Awards for the book in the category of history/biography.

How Protests Against the Jim Crow Credit Market Changed the Civil Rights Movement

Before the civil rights movement captured the nation’s attention, activists and community groups were protesting against exploitative credit and exclusionary lending practices...

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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.

Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals

Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard  is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.

Getting Partisans To Listen to One Another Can Reduce Political Polarization

In new research, Guglielmo Briscese and Michèle Belot find that reminding Americans of shared values can open lines of communication and help reduce political polarization.

The State of The Debate on U.S. Antitrust and Competition

This year’s Stigler Center conference on antitrust and competition invited scholars to propose alternatives to the consumer welfare standard.

The Impact of Algorithms on Competition and Competition Law

Antonio Capobianco, the deputy head of the OECD Competition Division and one of the authors of the 2023 OECD report on algorithmic competition and collusion, explains the risks that algorithms and artificial intelligence pose to competition and how regulators can approach the changing competition paradigm.

Rivals’ Exit Should Be Incorporated into the Guidelines for Vertical Merger Evaluation

An exit-inducing vertical merger might reduce welfare even if it is a welfare-enhancing vertical merger absent exit. Therefore, the possibility for rivals’ exit should be incorporated into the guidelines for vertical merger evaluation, write Javier D. Donna and Pedro Pereira in new research.

The Business of Colonialism

In his new book, Empire Incorporated, Philip Stern argues that corporations drove the global expansion of the British Empire rather than provide...