Money in Politics

The Problem with Political Antitrust

In new research, Nolan McCarty and Sepehr Shahshahani find that, contrary to the concerns of Neo-Brandeisians, Market et power does not correlate with political power via outsized lobbying.

The Benefits of Working for a Victorious Political Campaign

With slightly more than one year until the United States presidential election, electoral campaigns are about to ramp up. These quadrennial elections, like so many others in democracies worldwide, will mobilize thousands of campaign workers who play an integral role in shaping candidates’ electoral performance. Yet, little is known about these workers and how the experience of working in a campaign shapes their professional lives. This column describes the findings from a new study on the career trajectories of campaign labor in Brazil, showing that connections forged on a campaign provide qualified workers with better employment and earnings opportunities. This article was originally published in VoxEU.

Family Ties as Corporate Power

Pablo Balán explains that family ties provide firms with an edge in collective action that enables them to be politically active through campaign donations, to engage in financial rent-seeking by obtaining subsidized state credit, and to bypass regulation seeking to curtail the influence of business by substituting individual contributions for corporate contributions. Scholars and advocates can benefit from a deeper understanding of organizational constraints to programmatic reform.

Foreign Influence Benefits Foreign Firms and Governments but the Benefits to Americans Are Less Decided

In new research, Marco Grotteria, Max Miller, and S Lakshmi Naaraayanan create and analyze a dataset of more than 12,000 FARA filings to investigate the drivers and outcomes of foreign lobbying of U.S. legislators. Their findings can help inform new laws and regulations that improve government transparency and prevent the more nefarious effects of foreign lobbying.

Carl Schmitt and the Origins of Friedrich Hayek’s Thought on Rent-Seeking

Friedrich Hayek viewed the subject of rent-seeking not from the usual welfare economics perspective, but from a constitutional economics perspective. In a...

Defense Contracts Are Going to the Best Connected, Not Necessarily the Best

In new research, Şenay Ağca and Deniz Igan use the shock of the September 11 attacks and declaration of war on Afghanistan...

Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving

A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies'...

Survey Highlights Backlash to Increasingly Political Corporate America

A recent poll shows that 71% of Americans view large companies negatively. The change has been driven by Republicans who dislike the...

Corporations Are Not “We the People”

The Citizens United ruling contradicts the Founders, decades of Supreme Court precedent and the will of the American people.

What Citizens United Did Not Predict and Why It’s Time To Reconsider

Citizens United v. FEC stands in the public eye as the U.S. Supreme Court case that flooded U.S. elections with “dark money”...

Latest news

Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure

Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.

How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors

Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.

Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation

The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.

How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism

In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.

The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect

In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.

The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses

Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.

We Need Better Research on the Relationship Between Market Power and Productivity in the Hospital Industry

Antitrust debates have largely ignored questions about the relationship between market power and productivity, and scholars have provided little guidance on the issue due to data limitations. However, data is plentiful on the hospital industry for both market power and operating costs and productivity, and researchers need to take advantage, writes David Ennis.