The Role of the State

Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York reflects on the history of cryptocurrency and his experience adjudicating criminal cases involving it.

The following is an excerpt from "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, now out at Princeton University Press. 

Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reviews Kenneth Rogoff’s new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead, which reflects on the rise and ongoing fall of the American dollar’s global dominance. Rogoff discusses his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

Anat R. Admati reviews Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (2024) by Melissa B. Jacoby.

In new research, Axel Gottfries and Gregor Jarosch develop a model to understand how wage-fixing cartels operate and show how to gauge the harm they cause to workers.

Judge Amit Mehta will shortly provide his remedy to Google’s monopoly in internet search. Fiona Scott Morton and Paul Heidhues argue that the remedy must include a cap on Google’s payments to the mobile phone manufacturers, carriers, and web browsers that propelled its monopoly. Because any outright ban risks harming Google’s current partners in the short term, Judge Mehta should consider pursuing a flexible ban that instead limits the revenue these partners can receive from Google in order to encourage market entry and competition.

Jan Broulík writes that the interest and willingness of European competition authorities and courts to intervene in markets to protect labor has made critical strides over the last few months. However, it still has a ways to go to even catch up with its American counterpart.

Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reflects on the comments from his panel on competition advocacy at the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference. He weighs the meaning and possibility for a democratically legitimate antitrust and competition policy.

The following is an excerpt from Chris Hughes’ new book, “Marketcrafters: the 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy,” now out at Simon & Schuster. You can listen to Hughes discuss his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on a new Capitalisn't episode here.

In new research, Sarah Hinck and Jasper van den Boom argue that the European Union’s Digital Markets Act’s (DMA) whistleblower tool does not yet bring enough to the table to effectively incentivize potential informants to report on Big Tech violations.