Capture

Financial crises routinely trigger sweeping overhauls of financial regulation, but whose interests do these reforms serve? In new research, Orkun Saka, Yuemei Ji, and Clement Minaudier find that political leaders facing term limits are much more likely to respond to financial crises by introducing reforms that benefit banks over the public or long-term financial stability. This phenomenon occurs more frequently in countries where the revolving door between politics and finance is common.

In new research, Nicholas Short, Sophie Hill, and Jacob Brown examine "ideological capture": regulatory capture that works not through lobbying but through experts defining what goals and values regulators may consider. Surveying the public alongside antitrust lawyers, they find the consumer welfare standard marginalizes important public concerns, like the risk of increased layoffs or more lobbying power.

Henry Simons, the “Crown Prince” of the Chicago School and a professor in the economics department and the law school prior to World War...

Matthew Lucky reviews The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, now out at Henry Holt and Co.

In new research, Andrey Simonov, Daniil Mikhailov, Ruben Enikolopov, and Ruben Durante estimate that when a 2016 law pushed Russia’s leading news aggregator Yandex to reduce its references to independent outlets, readers kept following its recommended news stories as before, reducing traffic to the excluded outlets. In response, excluded outlets changed the news they produced.

In new research, Francisco E. Beneke Avila proposes a multifactor test to distinguish between the legitimate exercise of the right to lobbying and efforts to capture areas of public policy. He argues that the latter is an abuse of the firm’s political rights that can justify the intervention of EU competition authorities when corporate political activity leads to a lessening of competition. 

The rise of the far right has been a defining feature of political systems in developed democracies over the past two decades. In recent research, Alison Johnston and Juliet Johnson demonstrate that domestic bond investors have become an important constraint on populist governments and their access to capital. 

In new research, Reilly S. Steel finds that corporate leaders’ individual political preferences are shifting left, but their aggregate spending remains skewed to the right. 

In new research, Vishavdeep Sharma and Krishnendu Ghosh Dastidar analyze corporate corruption through the lens of market competition. Firms often bribe officials to block rivals from entering their markets, and their incentive to do so depends less on how competitive a market is than on what kind of competition it has.

In new research, Luca Macedoni and Ariel Weinberger argue that large firms are more likely to lobby in favor of strict industry regulations when they can reduce competition by imposing high fixed costs on smaller, less-profitable firms.