Environmental damage
Capitalism Does Not Require a Tradeoff Between Planet and Profit
Critics of capitalism claim that the economic system incorrigibly encourages the exploitation of the planet and is thus incompatible with efforts to...
Fracking Can Lead to Elevated Salt Levels in Surface Water, Study Finds
A new study finds that fracking can lead to increased salt levels in water surfaces, especially during the early stages of production...
What Happens When Multinationals Appear in Reporting on Activist Assassinations? High-Profile Media Has Bite
A new report finds that being linked to human rights abuses—merely appearing in reporting around high-profile events—can significantly influence a company’s stock...
President-Elect Joe Biden and the Real Lessons of DuPont
Simply talking corporate America into being more responsible is not enough. It may get corporations to talk the talk, but not to...
How Companies Spin Off Environmental Liabilities to Avoid Legal Obligations
Environmental externalities are vexing for corporate decision makers, but some companies have figured out a way to deal with them: a spinoff....
Livestreaming Polluters to Enforce Environmental Policy: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Pittsburgh
Enforcing environmental regulations is controversial and can be costly. But researchers at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon have proposed a low-cost alternative for enforcement—disclosing emissions...
Depositors Disciplining Banks: The Impact of Scandals
Can depositor activism make a real difference? New research set to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference examines the Dakota...
What Can We Learn from London’s Long Struggle with Air Pollution?
Research on the long-term effects of pollution on mortality has been held back by lack of historical pollution data. In a new working paper,...
Does Environmental Crime Pay?
A new Stigler Center working paper conducts a cost-benefit analysis of DuPont's emissions of a toxic chemical dubbed C8.
The Trump administration has shown clear signs that it...
LATEST NEWS
Fiscal Policy
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
