Goliath

“The Question Is Whether We Live in a Democracy or a Corporate State”

In an interview with ProMarket, Goliath author Matt Stoller discusses the political choices that led to the downfall of the American antimonopoly movement and the “addiction to...

How the “Watergate Babies” Released the Beast of Monopoly Upon America

Why did Washington respond to the 2008 financial crisis by pushing even more wealth and power into the hands of the same people that...

The Counterfeit Capitalism of WeWork: Predatory Pricing as a Business Model

The company failed to go public and its founder, Adam Neumann, had to step down. This is good news: ordinary investors refused to put...

The Surprising Twist in GOP Economic Thinking: Tax Cuts Might Be Bad for Business

Senator Mitt Romney wrote Donald Trump a letter to stop his plan to reduce capital gain taxes. This is an important signal that a...

How Powerful Ideas Can Shape Society: Aaron Director and the Triumph of Nihilism

The rise of giants like Amazon and Facebook proves the long-lasting influence of Director's approach. His intellectual and political legacy is the transition of...

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.