Covid
How and When to Restart the Economy: a Webinar with Nobel Laureate Paul Romer
Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier and Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer explore what options we have to stop the pandemic and recover economic activities. Is...
How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home? In the United States, It’s 37 percent
Evaluating the economic impact of "social distancing" measures taken to arrest the spread of Covid-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: How...
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...
Managing Expectations Is Critical to Ensure Compliance with Stay-at-Home Measures
A study of a representative sample of Italians finds that 50 percent of respondents reported having adopted all recommended actions, including staying at home,...
How Human and Institutional Behavior Change in the Context of Pandemics: a Webinar
Princeton Professor Markus Brunnermeier and Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, discuss the economics of pandemics. From the bubonic plague to...
An Alternative to Complete Shutdown: Let Younger People Work
The mortality rate of Covid-19 is rising with age. The cost of the economic shutdown declines with the number of people not subject to the shutdown. Consequently,...
From Most No-Brainer to Most Complicated: A List of Policy Proposals to Mitigate the Virus’ Impact
Policymakers need to figure out which sectors we wish to keep up and running (food, health care), which sectors we want to contract rapidly...
Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Warnings Unheeded, Stock Selling, and the Chinese Cover-Up
Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
I had an utterly irrational sliver of...
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.
