Banking

Elections Hinder Companies’ Access to Credit

A large body of literature has produced uncertain conclusions about how elections affect firms’ access to credit. In a wide-ranging analysis of...

Resisting Regulatory Capture in the 1857 Financial Crisis

The historical origins of financial crises teaches us about changing attitudes toward government intervention into private markets.

How Should the Law Tackle Rapidly Evolving Financial Technologies?

The last half-century has witnessed an explosion of technology changing how the financial landscape functions for customers and new and legacy banking...

The Insight and Influence of Douglas Diamond

Chicago Booth professors Zhiguo He and Yueran Ma discuss their admiration for the work and mentorship of 2022 Nobel winner Douglas Diamond.

The Digital Divide During Epidemics: Who Benefits From New Financial Technologies?

A new paper finds that exposure to an epidemic in the current year significantly increases the likelihood that an individual completes financial...

Reaching for Influence: Do Banks Use Loans to Establish Political Connections?

A new study examines whether privately-owned banks seek political influence by offering preferred loan terms to corporate borrowers with valuable political connections,...

Do People Think Finance Benefits Society?

A new paper seeks to measure popular sentiment toward finance based on mentions of “finance” in millions of books, spanning eight languages...

“This Crisis Is Different: the Coronavirus Is a Social Disease Which We Need to Tackle as a Community”

In an extensive interview, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Chicago Booth professor Raghuram Rajan discusses the pandemic's impact on financial...

Over 60 Leading Finance Economists Ask SEC to Revise the Shareholder Voting Draft Reform

The new regulation that Security and Exchange Commissioners voted in November doesn't fix proxy advisory industry duopoly problems, but it actually makes them worse:...

“The Question Is Whether We Live in a Democracy or a Corporate State”

In an interview with ProMarket, Goliath author Matt Stoller discusses the political choices that led to the downfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the “addiction to...

LATEST NEWS

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

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.

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.

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.

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.