Financial Crisis
Resisting Regulatory Capture in the 1857 Financial Crisis
The historical origins of financial crises teaches us about changing attitudes toward government intervention into private markets.
Why Financial Regulations Might Fail to Produce Their Desired Outcome: The Case of the Capital Conservation Buffer
The capital conservation buffer (CCB) was created after the 2008 financial crisis, instructing banks to retain their dividends in an escrow account and...
Americans Report Record Level of Trust in Banks and Big Corporations, But not in the US Government
2019 Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index increases from 27.6 percent to 33.3 percent, showing the highest level of financial trust from the American...
How Antimonopoly Was Revitalized, Part 2: Barack Obama and the End of the End of History
In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection, Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The...
Ten Years After the Financial Crisis: “We Are Safer, But Not As Safe As We Should and Could Be”
Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis,...
“In the Wake of the 2008 Crisis, You Can't Ignore the Influence of Big Business on Economic Policy”
Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was...
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (September 7–16)
Is the government's response to the 2008 financial crisis responsible for the rise of populism in the US and Europe?; the real Google censorship...
How the Triple Tax Exemption on Puerto Rico’s Bonds Financed Its Territorial Status—and Helped Spark Its Debt Crisis
How did Puerto Rico manage to incur a monumental debt of $72 billion without raising red flags among the sophisticated investors who continuously bought...
What Schumpeter Can Teach Economists about the Great Recession
Ten years after Lehman Brothers’ failure, Schumpeter’s analysis of the Great Depression and his warnings to posterity are as timely as they are prophetic,...
Why Are There So Few Bankers on American Corporate Boards?
Relatively few American companies have bankers on their boards. New research reveals that bankers were commonly represented on corporate boards in the 19th century,...
LATEST NEWS
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.
Economic History
How Anthony Downs’s Analysis Explains Rational Voters’ Preferences for Populism
In new research, Cyril Hédoin and Alexandre Chirat use the rational-choice theory of economist Anthony Downs to explain how populism rationally arises to challenge established institutions of liberal democracy.
Antitrust and Competition
The Impact of Large Institutional Investors on Innovation Is Not as Positive as One Might Expect
In a new paper, Bing Guo, Dennis C. Hutschenreiter, David Pérez-Castrillo, and Anna Toldrà-Simats study how large institutional investors impact firm innovation. The authors find that large institutional investors encourage internal research and development but discourage firm acquisitions that would add patents and knowledge to their firms’ portfolios, hampering overall innovation.
Antitrust and Competition
The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses
Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.
