CARES

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: The Risk Of Reopening – a Reading List

Despite warnings from government and health officials, some states are choosing to begin reopening their economies this week by ending lockdown restrictions. In this...

How to Save 40 percent of the Payroll Protection Program’s Costs

Thanks to the loan program part of the CARES Act, small businesses can receive up to 2.5 times their monthly payroll, regardless of how much...

The Hidden Risks of Stimulus Packages: Federal Debt Is Not a Problem – Until It Is

Most economists agree that some stimulus bill to mitigate the effect of the pandemic was a necessary evil (although they argue about how good the...

Back to Work? The Political Preparation for “Phase 2” of the Pandemic Is a Matter of Trust

According to a special wave of the Booth/Kellogg Financial Trust Index, Americans have bought into social distancing rules. However, most of the respondents are...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: Where Does the Money Come From? With Special Guest Eugene Fama

As Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales predicted in a previous episode, the government is running out of money and will ask Congress for additional...

The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don’t

According to the 18th-century French banker and philosopher Richard Cantillon, who benefits when the state prints money is based on its institutional setup. In...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: Winners and Losers in the Stimulus Bill – a Reading List

In order to combat the coronavirus, Congress has passed a $2 trillion stimulus bill that targets individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. From an...

LATEST NEWS

Do Wealth Taxes Significantly Curb Wealth Inequality?

Politicians and governments in the United States and elsewhere have recently proposed or implemented wealth taxes to supplement revenue and reduce wealth inequality. In a new study, Samira Marti, Isabel Z. Martínez, and Florian Scheuer show how decreases in wealth taxes led to increases in wealth inequality in Switzerland, though they find that these decreases alone are not enough to explain the magnitude of widening disparities.

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.