Government
Governments Were Forced to Restrict Civil Liberties to Deal With Covid-19. More Flexible Constitutions Could Prevent That From Becoming the New Normal
A new paper argues that exploitation of gaps within democratic constitutions during emergencies, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, has the potential to...
What Are They Hiding? What Firms Don’t Want Us to Know About Their Economic Development Incentives
State and local governments offer firms all kinds of incentives in hopes of spurring local economic development. New research finds that a...
The Costs of Political Misalignment: Forest Fires and Bank Loans in Turkey
Recent wildfires in Turkey have not only destroyed more than 95,000 hectares of its coastal forestland but also divided the country further...
Government Regulation is the Pro-Market Solution
The Covid-19 pandemic has utterly discredited the false dichotomy of government vs. markets. Extensive government regulation is a prerequisite for the proper...
Back to Work? The Political Preparation for “Phase 2” of the Pandemic Is a Matter of Trust
According to a special wave of the Booth/Kellogg Financial Trust Index, Americans have bought into social distancing rules. However, most of the respondents are...
Is Regulation Jeopardizing Policy Response to Coronavirus Crisis? Sendhil Mullainathan and Richard Thaler Collect Red-tape Stories
Two of the most well-known University of Chicago economists launched a website to collect examples of regulations that are limiting the United States' reaction to...
Keeping Business Alive During the Coronavirus Crisis: Government as Buyer of Last Resort
The government has to compensate businesses and workers for their losses so that each business can re-emerge almost intact after the hibernation due to...
Captured Western Governments Are Failing the Coronavirus Test
In deciding on possible countermeasures, residents of Western democracies often hear only two opposite perspectives: Is the priority to minimize the loss of human...
Why the US Government Buys Overpriced Services From McKinsey
The Industrial Funding Fee pays $3 million a year for a 23-year old McKinsey employee instead of hiring an experienced person directly to do...
Governments Bear Much of the Responsibility for Rising Inequality—But Also Have the Tools to Reduce It
A new study tracks the influence of public policy on inequality and argues that the main rise in inequality has been a result of...
LATEST NEWS
Antitrust and Competition
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...
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Antitrust and Competition
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.
Book Excerpts
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.
Antitrust and Competition
Creating a Modern Antitrust Welfare Standard that Integrates Post-Chicago and Neo-Brandeisian Goals
Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel A. Lozada argue that the Consumer Welfare Standard is inconsistent with modern welfare economics and that a modern approach to antitrust could integrate traditional Congressional goals as advocated by the Neo-Brandesians. Such an approach could be the basis for an alliance between the post-Chicago economists and the Neo-Brandesians.
