Rent seeking

Do People Think Finance Benefits Society?

A new paper seeks to measure popular sentiment toward finance based on mentions of “finance” in millions of books, spanning eight languages and hundreds...

Prison Labor Can Create Perverse Incentives for Incarceration and Reduce Trust in Legal Institutions

Government proponents of prison labor should be mindful of the potential for negative effects, including increased incarceration rates and citizens’ deteriorating views on state...

A New Stigler Center Case Study Explores the Link Between Italy’s Morandi Bridge Disaster and Crony Capitalism

Two years ago, the Morandi bridge collapse claimed 43 lives. Based on financial statements, Italian government documents, and interviews with independent experts and corporate...

Much of Antitrust Law Today Is Based on Unsupported or Demonstrably False Economic Theories. Will Economists Take Heed?

Many of the economic assumptions of contemporary antitrust law are unsupported or false, as the executive branch and judiciary have remade the law in...

The Coronavirus Crisis Has Exposed Private Equity’s Unsustainable Business Model

Private equity portfolio companies are heavily indebted, and they aren’t generating enough cash to service debts. The steady increase in asset values since 2009...

Inequality Has Increased Far Less Than You Think (If You Consider Social Security Benefits)

In the United States, Social Security accounts for nearly 60 percent of the total wealth of the bottom 90 percent. Once Social Security is...

The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don’t

According to the 18th-century French banker and philosopher Richard Cantillon, who benefits when the state prints money is based on its institutional setup. In...

The Populist Right Has a Plan to Take Power Away From Financiers and Challenge China

The nationalist rhetoric of the Trump administration can obscure a more sophisticated recognition by some people in the populist world that the core dynamic...

Zoom, Netflix, Slack: Amazon Is Behind All the Services We Use to Work From Home (and That’s a Problem)

The new normal for millions of people represents a near-total dependence on Amazon’s cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and places a substantial portion...

MBA Students Against Corporate America: “Stop Lobbying the White House on the Defense Production Act”

Since the virus outbreak, the US Chamber of Commerce has lobbied the federal government to limit the use of a piece of legislation that...

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