Economists' capture

How to Fix the Courts’ Misuse of Economics

Economics has a valuable role to play in antitrust enforcement, but the courts often base their antitrust decisions on unfounded empirical claims...

Academic Gatekeepers, Real and Imagined, Are Threatening the Credibility of the Field of Political Finance 


One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from...

Iowa’s “Butter-Margarine War”: T. W. Schultz’s Fight for Academic Freedom

During the Second World War, economists at Iowa State College published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” which would...

Why Big Tech Companies Should Engage With Academia, and Why They Don’t

“Academic engagement” of a Big Tech firm: that job should exist. But it has not happened, and it probably won’t happen, unless...

It Is Such a Small World: The Market-Design Academic Community Evolved in a Business Network

Private equity funds such as Michael Dell's MSD Capital made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the 2017 FCC spectrum...

Tainted Philanthropy in Higher Education

Our institutions of higher education should apply appropriate ethical and academic standards when considering financial donations; otherwise, they risk promoting the private interests of...

Are the Findings in Academic Economic Journals to be Trusted?

A growing number of studies provide evidence that editors (and referees) of academic journals often publish only findings showing a significant effect or surprising...

A New Capitalisn't Episode: Did the Economists of the '60s and '70s Ruin the Economy?

Are economists to blame for our current state of affairs? That's the argument Binyamin Appelbaum makes in his book "The Economists' Hour." In this...

Data-Driven Ideology: The Problem With Economists' Takeover of Policymaking

According to New York Times journalist Binyamin Appelbaum's recent book The Economists' Hour, economics is not the unbiased science that it pretends to be, but...

Corporations and the Rise of the Chicago Law and Economics Movement

From its birth in 1946 onward, corporations made possible and crucially supported the rise of the Chicago law and economics movement. Aaron Director,...

LATEST NEWS

Uninhibited Campaign Donations Risks Creating Oligarchy

In new research, Valentino Larcinese and Alberto Parmigiani find that the 1986 Reagan tax cuts led to greater campaign spending from wealthy individuals, who benefited the most from this policy. The authors argue that a very permissive system of political finance, combined with the erosion of tax progressivity, created the conditions for the mutual reinforcement of economic and political disparities. The result was an inequality spiral hardly compatible with democratic ideals.

Did the Meme Stock Revolution Actually Change Anything?

Many financial commentators thought that the surge of retail investors participating in the stock market, the most notable of whom boosted “meme stocks” like GameStop, would democratize corporate governance and improve prosocial firm behavior, including the promotion of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. In new research, Dhruv Aggarwal, Albert H. Choi, and Yoon-Ho Alex Lee find evidence that the exact opposite took place.

The Kroger-Albertsons Merger Will Not Help Grocery Competition

Kroger and Albertsons say they need to merge to compete with Walmart. Claire Kelloway argues that what they really want is Walmart’s monopsony power, and permitting mergers on these grounds will only harm suppliers, workers, and consumers.

Innovators Respond to Their Presidential Candidate Winning With More Innovation

Does an inventor’s political identity influence their productivity? In a new paper, Joseph Engelberg, Runjing Lu, William Mullins, and Richard Townsend examine the impacts of the 2008 and 2016 United States presidential elections on Democrat and Republican inventors, with a particular focus on the quantity and quality of patents after the country elects a new president.

Letter to the Editor: Former FTC and DOJ Chief Economists Urge Separation of Economic and Legal Analysis in Merger Guidelines

Seventeen former chief economists of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division urge current Agency heads to separate the legal and economic analysis in the draft Merger Guidelines to strengthen the role of the latter in merger review.