Commentary

Bethany McLean's Weekend Reading List: the SEC, Tesla, and California's Housing Crisis

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.    One of my ongoing obsessions is the...

Bethany McLean's Weekend Reading List: Pension Problems, Funky Accounting, and Elon Musk

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean  My three picks this week deal with...

Esther Duflo: How to Find the Right Questions

In this piece, originally published in 2011 by the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, Esther Duflo, co-recipient of...

With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other

Capitalism’s global victory has been achieved through two different types of capitalist systems: the liberal meritocratic capitalism that has developed incrementally in the West,...

Standard Oil and Antitrust: the Effects of Aaron Director's Socratic Method

Aaron Director, who died 15 years ago, made important contributions to the analysis of business practices. None were ever published under his name. Professor...

Aaron Director’s Legacy: The Beginning of Doubt is the Beginning of Wisdom

Aaron Director died 15 years ago. He published almost nothing, but his ideas influenced a generation of economists and intellectuals. Professor Stephen Stigler remembers...

What Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Save American Journalism Gets Right – and What It Misses

Independent and effective news reporting is at the heart of the democratic process. The dangers to media plurality and local journalism that Sanders identifies...

The World Cup of Fraud

Scandal-rocked FIFA has sought to scrub up its image by bringing in ostensibly disinterested outsiders to fill oversight roles. Here, Steven A. Bank argues...

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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.

The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp

In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.

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.