News

The following is an excerpt from Martin Daunton's new book, "The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023," out November 14.

Chevron and ExxonMobil claim their announced mergers with Hess and Pioneer take advantage of market efficiencies, but a closer look reveals an antiquated tax provision likely sweetening these dangerous deals. Antitrust authorities must carefully review the serious risks entailed in these proposed mergers. In parallel, the United States federal government needs to end large tax-free reorganizations—the most egregious way in which American taxpayers are subsidizing monopolistic practices, writes Niko Lusiani.

In an excerpt from her new book, Seeing Others, sociologist Michèle Lamont describes the impact of neoliberal ideas on the working class.

The effectiveness of tax policy depends on whether sellers pass on changes in tax rates to consumers through changes in price. In new research, Felix Montag, Robin Mamrak, Alina Sagimuldina, and Monika Schnitzer investigate how this tax pass-through in turn depends on how much consumers know about prices. They show that if consumers are not aware of how prices for the same product vary between sellers, then they will be unaffected by tax changes intended to increase or decrease consumption.

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.

The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Burns' new book "Milton Friedman, The Last Conservative," out November 14.

New research by Vesa Pursiainen, Hanwen Sun and Yue Xiang finds that competition hurts corporate incentives to fulfill environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. Firms facing more competitive pressure have worse ESG scores, in particular when the firms have short-term-oriented shareholders. However, firms located in areas that are more concerned about climate change appear more willing to sacrifice profits for better ESG performance.

In the 1990s, a host of antitrust rules impacting the television industry were repealed. Today’s streaming giants are exploiting the rollback and vertically integrating, a trend that will reduce the quality of TV shows and send us back to the era of network giants.

In late September, the United States Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon for using a set of anticompetitive strategies to maintain its monopoly in the online retail market. ProMarket asked four antitrust experts —two economists and two law professors —to discuss the foundations and strength of the complaint’s arguments, the history of similar cases, and the potential for a legal remedy.

William Megginson, Kedi Wang, and Junjie Xia find in new research that the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption campaign produced worse firm performance by reducing managers’ risk tolerance.