News

Accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper was recently forced to sell its government consulting business after using privileged information to help firms evade taxes. Richard Holden examines the scandal and explains why the response from the Australian Tax Office points to regulatory capture by the big 4 accounting firms.

Michal Gal discusses the regulatory hurdles to deal with the impacts of algorithmic price collusion. In the meantime, she says, market fixes include algorithmic consumers and platform nudges to mitigate price coordination.

In recent years, many Asian countries have received attention for their burgeoning economic development and innovation. Much of this development and innovation is driven by business groups, large and highly diversified networks of firms with common ownership (such as Samsung). Simon Commander and Saul Estrin argue in their new book that the role of business groups as catalysts for innovation is much more nuanced than the hype suggests. 

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted its annual antitrust and competition conference in late April. The following is a transcript of the Tim Wu's keynote in conversation with Binyamin Appelbaum of The New York Times.

Ashutosh Bhagwat argues in new research that expecting social media platforms to serve as gatekeepers for the “truth” flounders on economic, organizational, and democratic grounds. In fact, the end of media gatekeepers and elite control over public discourse may be what is necessary to reinvigorate the marketplace of ideas and reduce political polarization.

Without saying how, FTC Commissioner Slaughter says competition authorities should do more than just protect competition in pipeline products; they should protect broader competition...

Economists have proposed two main theories to explain the recent spike in prices. Progressives have attributed the rise in inflation to corporate greed and have suggested price controls in response. Other economists have turned back to the New Consensus in Macroeconomics that arose in the 1970s in response to steep inflation blamed on the large Keynesian fiscal expansion of the preceding decades. Matías Vernengo writes that neither camp has correctly diagnosed the problems with current inflation. Proponents of Greedflation overlook the price stability of the last few decades even as market concentration increased. On the other hand, advocates of the New Consensus similarly forget their history and the commodity shocks and price-wage spiral that were the real culprit for inflation in the 1970s.

Axel Gautier, Ashwin Ittoo, and Pieter van Cleynenbreugel write that the practice of pricing algorithms tacitly colluding remains theoretical for now, and technological obstacles render it very unlikely in the short term. However, regulators must still prepare for a future in which artificial intelligence achieves the necessary sophistication to collude.

Access to the internet and the rise of social media has overloaded voters with information and exposed them to a proliferation of fake news. Using political budget cycles, or the tendency for politicians to increase the budget in run-up to elections to win more votes, as a proxy for misinformation, Fabio Padovano and Pauline Mille show in new research that voters who score higher on the OECD’s  Programme for International Student Assessment and achieve a higher level of education are better able to hold politicians to account.

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted its annual antitrust and competition conference in late April. The following is a transcript of the Susan Athey's keynote in conversation with Tommaso Valletti.