Capitalisn't

Capitalisn’t: What’s in the Twitter Files and What Does It Mean?

In the March 30 episode of Capitalisn’t, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales discuss the Twitter Files, why so much of the mainstream...

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...

Thomas Piketty On Creating A More Equal Society

In this unedited podcast conversation, economist Thomas Piketty talks to Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales about the lessons from this movement toward...

What Accounts for the Gender Equality Among Pharmacists?

In her new book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin traces how generations of women have...

The Aristocracy of Talent: Business Intelligence

In the following excerpt from his new book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, Adrian Wooldridge traces "how universities...

How Should We Finance Higher Education If Not Through Student Debt? A New Capitalisn’t Episode

In a new episode of Capitalisn’t, Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean take a look at the student debt crisis: How did we...

Judges Who Use Economic Reasoning in Court Decisions Rule In Favor of Business More Often

A new paper finds that judges who attended law schools with a strong law-and-economics intellectual environment use more economic reasoning, which is positively correlated with...

Institution Man: How Corporations Came to Dominate the US Economy

In the first chapter of his book Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explores how Adolf Berle, author of The Modern Corporation and Private...

eBook: Milton Friedman 50 Years Later, a Reevaluation

Over the past couple of months, ProMarket has hosted a lively debate on whether Milton Friedman was right or wrong when he...

Capitalisn’t Is Back: Can Economists and Journalists Work Together to Improve Capitalism?

Is capitalism the engine of prosperity, or is it the engine of destruction? On this podcast, we talk about the ways capitalism...

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.