Renée Adams

Renée Adams is a Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on information flows on boards, bank governance, group decision-making, the governance of central banks and gender diversity on and off boards.

A Directorship at a Federal Reserve Bank is Good News for Banks, but May be Bad News for the Fed

Far before the collapse of SVB, I provided systematic evidence that banks appear to benefit from their directorships on Federal Reserve Banks....

Letters that Matter: How Interest Groups Shape Financial Legislation

Members of Congress are inundated with an avalanche of correspondence on a daily basis. But what persuades them to heed the call?...

Academic Gatekeepers, Real and Imagined, Are Threatening the Credibility of the Field of Political Finance 


One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from...

Insider Trading Data Reveals Pandemic Is a Time for Questioning, Not Answering

Following news reports about executives selling shares in their corporations to avoid losses due to the pandemic, a new study takes a...

Economics’ Lack of Interest in Gender Proves: the “Dismal Science” Really Is Dismal

Economists are still in the dark about the role of gender. For economics to be credible, we have to recognize that our knowledge is...

When It Comes to Gender Imbalances, Academia’s Ignorance Is Self-Serving

The Ravina vs. Columbia case illustrates that challenging the status quo can be immensely costly. We economists should collectively think about how we can...

Latest news

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.