ESG & Corporate Governance

Stigler Center Talk: Corporate Governance in an Era of Shareholder Activism

The Stigler Center will host a panel on the prevalence of shareholder activism and how to improve corporate oversight on May 3rd.  Shareholder activism has experienced...

ProMarket Graph: Is There a Correlation Between Perception Measures and Reported Levels of Corruption?

New graph compares corruption perception indexes with reported cases of corruption.  What is the best way to measure corruption, and can there be a reliable way to...

Corporate Governance Externalities: How Directors’ Reputational Concerns Shape Governance of Other Firms

A new paper by Wharton’s Doron Levit and Carroll’s Nadya Malenko fleshes out the role that reputation plays in shaping the structure and effectiveness of...

The US Government Loses As Much As $111 Billion Annually Due to Corporate Tax Dodging

Report: For every dollar spent on lobbying, the 50 largest corporations received more than $4,000 in government support. The US government is losing as much...

Stigler Center Talk: Uber and the Future of Work-On-Demand

David Plouffe,  board member and Chief Advisor at Uber, is coming to give a talk at the Stigler Center. Within seven years, Uber has managed...

Is There a Crisis in the Economic Theory of the Firm? Participants at Harvard Business School Conference Agree: Firms Try to Change the Rules...

A novel conference at Harvard Business School brought together top scholars in order to answer the question: Is Milton Friedman’s dictum that firms that...

The Heirs of John D. Rockefeller Divest from Fossil Fuels, Slam Exxon Mobil as “Morally Reprehensible”

The Rockefeller Family Fund announced on Wednesday that it will be divesting entirely from fossil fuels, due to the industry’s stance on climate change.   The...

Stigler Center Talk: Robert Bilott on How to Protect Our Drinking Water

The lawyer who has been dubbed "DuPont's Worst Nightmare" will discuss the legal, regulatory, political, and scientific challenges of addressing unregulated chemical contaminants in drinking...

“The United States Has Lost the Will and Ability to Prosecute Top Corporate Executives”

Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jesse Eisinger speaks about executive impunity and the key to justice in America.   In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a scathing indictment...

Can a CEO in Good Conscience Not Be a Crony Capitalist?

The above question — posed by Brucest1, a reader of this blog — is extremely important and deserves a fully articulated answer. Brucest1 seems to conclude that a...

Latest news

Creation over Time in Copyright and Patent

On May 18, the United States Supreme Court decided two intellectual property cases with two seemingly different results. A closer look, however, reveals a complimentary concern with the monopolistic power of first movers and how the legal system should enable innovation from second movers over time, writes Randy Picker.

ESG Standards’ Good, Bad and Ugly

The Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State hosted a virtual event discussing the standards, metrics and disclosures of investments focused on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. The following is a transcript of the event.

Reregulate.

Lee Hepner and William J. McGee respond to Clifford Winston’s ProMarket piece asserting that further deregulation of the airline industry would resolve problems in the industry. Instead, the authors claim a return to regulation would produce better results for travelers.

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.