News

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In the 1990s, a host of antitrust rules impacting the television industry were repealed.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.

Zephyr Teachout provides her Round-Two comments on the draft Merger Guidelines.

The Chinese Communist Party drastically reduced Hong Kong’s autonomy in 2020 with a national security law and has cracked down on resistance ever since. The consequences have left its people culturally and economically poorer, writes Casey Moser.

The Stigler Center invites submissions of short academic articles (up to 3,000 words) focused on mapping out how antitrust enforcement impacts the development of...

In light of the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and recent debates about the socio-political implications of large-language models and chatbots, Manuel Wörsdörfer analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA), the world’s first comprehensive attempt by a government body to address and mitigate the potential negative impacts of AI technologies. He recommends areas where the AIA could be improved.