Income Inequality

Monopolies: Silent Spreaders of Poverty and Economic Inequality

The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the vast inequalities that exist within the US economy. Monopoly power should be at the top of...

The Monopoly Harms That Antitrust Keeps Missing

In his new book Monopolized, journalist David Dayen tells the stories of individuals who have suffered at the hands of monopolists, showing...

Police Stops of Black Drivers Increase Following Trump Rallies, New Study Suggests 

A new study looks into how Trump's 2016 presidential campaign affected police behavior toward Black Americans and finds that the probability that...

More and More Employers Are Spying on Workers Online. Federal Regulators Are Okay With It

Employers today have numerous tools at their disposal to monitor workers’ behavior and communications. Outdated federal regulations and an administration that prioritizes...

Should We Defund the Police? A New Capitalisn’t Reading List

In this episode of the Capitalisn't podcast, Kate and Luigi take an economist's look at the concept of defunding the police.

How to Get Police Reform Done? Use Direct Democracy

Instead of just imploring their representatives to fix things, Americans can use the tools of direct democracy to take charge and promote...

Break Up the Police

In most cities in America, it is not the police that answers to the mayors, but the mayors to the police. The...

The Economic and Social Implications of Racial Disparities: A Webinar With Lisa Cook

Michigan State University professor Lisa Cook joined Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance to discuss how violence impacts innovation, as well as the...

“We’ve Never Had a Purely Capitalist Economy—We’ve Had State-Subsidies for Some and Exclusion for Others”

In an interview with ProMarket, UC Irvine law professor Mehrsa Baradaran discussed the connection between the current protest wave and the deep-seated...

Are We Witnessing the Fall of the American Liberal Order?

In the past 30 years, liberalism has not lived up to its promise to deliver economic returns for the broad majority of...

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.