ESG & Corporate Governance

This Proposal Could Inadvertently Improve Corporate Accounting

A provision within the Biden administration’s Build Back Better bill that assesses a minimum tax on certain companies based on their income...

Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation: Covid, the Retail Crisis, and REITs

In an excerpt from his new book Retail Recovery, retail expert and author Mark Pilkington explores the impact of the sector's decline...

Addressing Climate Change Must Begin with Verifiable Carbon Accounting

Robert Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna propose a new approach for verifiable accounting on indirect corporate emissions that would apply to all corporations,...

The Social Responsibility of Business Includes Profits

Profits these days are often seen as a dirty word, but it is wrong to demonize profits. A company’s responsibility is not...

Managers Should Satisfy Only the Ethically Permissible Preferences of Shareholders

Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales have proposed a revision to the dominant model of the objective of the firm, most famously defended...

Unreliable Accounts: How Regulators Fabricate Conceptual Narratives to Diffuse Criticism

In 2010, as the world was reeling from the global financial crisis, the body that determines generally accepted accounting principles for listed...

Two Years After the Business Roundtable Statement: Pointing in the Right Direction

The 2019 Business Roundtable statement was a welcome break from the position that the nation’s top corporate CEOs took in 1997, when...

“Comments for Sale”: Charitable Donations Can Lead Non-profits to Support Corporate Regulatory Agendas

A new paper shows how financial ties between companies and non-profits can subvert rulemaking process and lead to regulations that favor the...

Two Years Later, Has the Business Roundtable Statement Transformed Capitalism?

Two years after the Business Roundtable redefined its statement of Purpose of a Corporation to include “a fundamental commitment to all of...

Why Corporate Purpose is Important to the Recovery From the Pandemic

A new initiative seeks to encourage directors, managers, asset owners, and other internal and external stakeholders to collaborate on articulating an actional...

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.