Academic Capture
Event Notes: Academic Bias Under the Microscope
That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. On April 22, Professors Christian Leuz,...
The Uber Files Reveal The Risk of Private Interests Controlling Our Data
Researchers discovered that the introduction of Uber had negative impacts on transportation, findings that required cooperation with public authorities when Uber refused...
“Uber Has Higher Prices and Worse Service Than the Taxi Industry Had Ten Years Ago”
Following the Uber Files leaks, transportation expert Hubert Horan explains why Uber is “hopelessly uneconomic” and how its engagement with policymakers and...
Relationships With Academics at the Center of the Uber Files Revelations
The Guardian’s exposé on Uber’s strategy of engaging with top academic researchers to produce corporate-friendly research calls to mind concerns regarding academic...
Academic Gatekeepers, Real and Imagined, Are Threatening the Credibility of the Field of Political Finance
One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from...
A Call for Comments: Have You Been Affected by Academic Gatekeeping?
On Friday, ProMarket published a piece by Renée Adams about the impact of academic gatekeeping in political finance. Do you have a...
“This Isn’t the Kind of Journalism That Serves Democracy Best”: How Place and Privilege Came to Define American News
In an interview with ProMarket, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Nikki Usher discusses how news in the US came to be...
Iowa’s “Butter-Margarine War”: T. W. Schultz’s Fight for Academic Freedom
During the Second World War, economists at Iowa State College published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” which would...
Why Big Tech Companies Should Engage With Academia, and Why They Don’t
“Academic engagement” of a Big Tech firm: that job should exist. But it has not happened, and it probably won’t happen, unless...
Government Regulation is the Pro-Market Solution
The Covid-19 pandemic has utterly discredited the false dichotomy of government vs. markets. Extensive government regulation is a prerequisite for the proper...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
Revising Guideline 6 With Evidence To Establish a Structural Inference for Input Foreclosure
Vertical merger law lacks the structural presumption of horizontal merger law, which shifts the burden from the government to the merging parties to provide evidence that a merger will not produce anticompetitive effects when it is known that the merger will substantially increase market concentration. To improve Guideline 6 of the draft Merger Guidelines concerning vertical foreclosure, Steven Salop develops a three-factor criteria with which the government antitrust agencies can show an analogous structural “inference” that shifts the burden of evidence to the merging parties.
Antitrust and Competition
How US Antitrust Enforcement Against Xerox Promoted Innovation by Japanese Competitors
Xerox invented modern copier technology and was so successful that its brand name became a verb. In 1972, U.S. antitrust authorities charged Xerox with monopolization and eventually ordered the licensing of all its copier-related patents. As new research by Robin Mamrak shows, this antitrust intervention promoted subsequent innovation in the copier industry, but only among Japanese competitors. Nevertheless, their innovations benefited U.S. consumers.
Antitrust and Competition
Revising the Merger Guidelines To Return Antitrust to a Sound Economic and Legal Foundation
The draft Merger Guidelines largely replace the consumer welfare standard of the Chicago School with the lessening of competition principle found in the 1914 Clayton Act. This shift would enable the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice Antitrust Division to utilize the full extent of modern economics to respond to rising concentration and its harmful effects, writes John Kwoka.
Economic History
How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism
In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.
Antitrust and Competition
The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect
In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.
