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

The Banking Risks of Central Bank Digital Currencies

The implementation of central bank digital currencies as the primary medium of exchange would exacerbate the flaws of our current fiat system which encourage banks to overextend credit and create liabilities that they cannot redeem. This will worsen the already recurring cycles of financial crises, writes Vibhu Vikramaditya.

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...

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.

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.

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.