Common Ownership
Gauging Common Ownership in Fintech Markets
A new empirical paper estimates the scope and impact of common ownership in fintech markets. The authors find limited common ownership among...
Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving
A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies'...
The Passive Mechanisms of Common Ownership
A new paper explores the conundrum that common ownership poses for antitrust enforcers and competition and corporate scholars and sheds light on...
The Economic Costs of Common Ownership
A new empirical study attempts to estimate the economy-wide welfare costs of common ownership. The authors find that they are large and...
Is There Really a Conflict Between Better Corporate Governance and More Competitive Product Markets?
A new study shows that the supposed tradeoff between better corporate governance and more competitive product markets may not exist. More commonly-owned...
“Doubt is Their Product”: The Difference Between Research and Academic Lobbying
Tommaso Valletti, the former Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission, reflects on the intersection of academic economics and policymaking and offers...
Horizontal Shareholding’s Anticompetitive Effects and the Mechanisms That Produce It
Waiting for further proof of causal mechanisms before addressing the anticompetitive harm caused by horizontal shareholding is unjustified, just as it was when people...
Making Your Vote Count: Does the Voting Behavior of Asset Managers Truly Reflect Their Clients’ Interests?
In the past five years, thanks to growing public pressure, there has been increased attention on the voting behavior of asset managers. As a...
The Greatest Anticompetitive Threat of Our Time: Fixing the Horizontal Shareholding Problem
Undisputed empirical studies confirm that horizontal shareholding poses a great anticompetitive threat. What can antitrust enforcers do about it? Quite a lot, in fact.
Editors'...
Firms with Owners in Common Are Freer about Publicly Disclosing Information
The accounting literature has long examined how public disclosures relate to firm competitiveness. If common ownership is in fact hurting competition, companies with owners...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
The Whig History of the Merger Guidelines
A pervasive "Whig" view of United States antitrust history among scholars and practitioners celebrates the Merger Guidelines' implementation of increasingly sophisticated economic methods since their...
Antitrust and Competition
Algorithmic Collusion in the Housing Market
While the development of artificial intelligence has led to efficient business strategies, such as dynamic pricing, this new technology is vulnerable to collusion and consumer harm when companies share the same software through a central platform. Gabriele Bortolotti highlights the importance of antitrust enforcement in this domain for the second article in our series, using as a case study the RealPage class action lawsuit in the Seattle housing market.
Antitrust and Competition
The Future Markets Model Explains Meta/Within: A Reply to Herb Hovenkamp
In response to both Herb Hovenkamp’s February 27 article in ProMarket and, perhaps more importantly, also to Hovenkamp’s highly regarded treatise, Lawrence B. Landman, first, shows that the Future Markets Model explains the court’s decision in Meta/Within. Since Meta was not even trying to make a future product, the court correctly found that Meta would not enter the Future Market. Second, the Future Markets Model is the analytical tool which Hovenkamp says the enforcers lack when they try to protect competition to innovate.
Book Excerpts
The Chicago Boys and the Chilean Neoliberal Project
In a new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards details the history of neoliberalism in Chile over the past seventy years. The Chicago Boys—a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago through the U.S. State Department’s “Chile Project”—played a central role in neoliberalism’s ascent during General Augusto Pinochet’s rule. What follows is an excerpt from the book on University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s 1975 visit to Chile to meet with Pinochet and business leaders.
Antitrust and Competition
Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals
Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.
