economists

The Dawn of Antitrust and the Egalitarian Roots of the Sherman Act

While it isn’t particularly controversial that concentrated economic power was a legislative target of the Sherman Act, when read as a corollary...

Towards a More Complete Understanding of Market Power and Consumer Harm in Antitrust Law

Antitrust law currently tends to disregard non-consumer harms and the potential influence of companies on policymaking. A new paper explores how antitrust...

Populism at the FTC Upsets the Antitrust Religion of Consumer Welfare: A Reply to Sokol and Wickelgren

Institutional change, on any fundamental level, will have those that seek to defend the status quo up in arms. But in order...

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...

The Chicago Planning Program and the Interdisciplinary Tradition of the Chicago School

The Chicago Planning Program, an interdisciplinary program that operated at the University of Chicago between 1947 and 1956, is an often-neglected part...

The Unintended Economist: How Thorstein Veblen Pivoted From Philosophy to Economics

In an excerpt from his book Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, Charles Camic explores the connection between Thorstein...

The Invention of Economic Growth: The Forgotten Origins of Gross Domestic Product in American Institutionalist Economics

Contemporary critiques of GDP’s role in policymaking see it as an ideological abstraction, emblematic of neoliberalism, that misrepresents “real” economic conditions. What...

Cogs and Monsters: Is Economics Destined to Remain a Dismal Science?

In her bold new book Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, Cambridge professor Diane Coyle offers a...

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...

Buchanan’s Samaritan’s Dilemma

The Samaritan’s dilemma is not only about the detrimental effects help can have on the beneficiaries. As James Buchanan explained in his...

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.