Capitalism

To Build an Equitable Economy, We Must Understand Capitalism’s Racist Heritage

American capitalism was built on racial exploitation, from the enslavement of Black people to institutionalized discrimination and its structural impact on our...

The Year’s Top 5 Capitalisn’t Podcast Episodes

This year's top five most-downloaded episodes of Capitalisn't ranged from discussions of private equity and inflation to Capitalism itself. Download these episodes...

Capitalism Does Not Require a Tradeoff Between Planet and Profit

Critics of capitalism claim that the economic system incorrigibly encourages the exploitation of the planet and is thus incompatible with efforts to...

How Austerity Emerged after World War I to Preserve Capitalism

In this excerpt of a new book, The Capital Order, Clara Mattei traces the origins of austerity to the period just after...

How Does Party-State Capitalism In China Interact With Global Capitalism?

Excerpted from The China Questions 2: Critical Insights Into Us-China Relations, edited by Maria Adele Carrai, Jennifer Rudolph, and Michael Szonyi, published...

Chart of the Week: Income Inequality Threatens Capitalism

A new survey of economists by the Initiative on Global Markets indicates that 67 percent agree or strongly agree that the rise...

Corporate Sovereigns and the Emergence of State Sovereignty: A Closer Look at the East India Company

A new data collection has made it possible to reveal the self-sovereignty of the English East India Trading Company that produced a...

Why Aligning Antitrust Policy With Sustainability is a Moral Imperative 

The looming ecological disaster means that it is time for competition researchers, policymakers, lawyers, and economists to devise competition policies that focus...

How China Became a Global Economic Powerhouse Through an Idiosyncratic Approach to Market Capitalism

Chinese reformers after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 agreed that it was necessary for China to move towards marketization, but...

The Communist Origins of China’s Embrace of Markets

In an excerpt from his book Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent, Jason M. Kelly explores the commercial relationships...

LATEST NEWS

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.

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.