Steven Kaplan
Steven Neil Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He conducts research on issues in private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance. He has published papers in a number of academic and business journals. He has testified to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and the U.S. House Financial Services Committee about his research. Kaplan is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics. Kaplan teaches advanced MBA and executive courses in entrepreneurial finance and private equity, corporate finance, corporate governance, and wealth management. BusinessWeek named him one of the top 12 business school teachers in the country. Professor Kaplan has been a member of the Chicago Booth faculty since 1988 and co-founded the entrepreneurship program at Booth.
News
The Enduring Wisdom of Milton Friedman
Shareholder value maximization has been extremely successful globally in the way that matters most because, in many cases, maximizing shareholder value is...
ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm
The SEC Proposal on Proxy Advisory Firms Will Provide Greater Transparency and Accountability
Proxy advisory firms lack transparency and their recommendations are not always in shareholders' interests. However, despite their poor performance, the two biggest firms' market...
Rent seeking
(God Knows) Wall Street Isn’t Perfect, But It Has Helped Make the World A Lot Better Off
If the criticisms against Wall Street had been accurate, the U.S. corporate sector today would be ailing. Instead, corporate profits are at historical highs...
Latest news
Antitrust and Competition
Tim Wu Responds to Letter by Former Agency Chief Economists
Former special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy Tim Wu responds to the November 27 letter signed by former chief economists at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department Antitrust Division calling for a separation of the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines.
Book Reviews
Can the Public Moderate Social Media?
ProMarket student editor Surya Gowda reviews the arguments made by Paul Gowder in his new book, The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms.
Income Inequality
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.
ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Research
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
