lockdown
Event Notes: How Will China Move on from the Covid-19 Pandemic?
Countries around the world have overseen wide-ranging public health responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. On June 10, the Stigler Center hosted a...
Managing the Covid-19 Pandemic: Good Health Policy Is Good Economic Policy
Many economists object to framing the response to the Covid-19 pandemic as choosing between health and wealth. Health protection and wealth creation...
The Monopolists and the Pandemic: What Covid-19 Teaches Us About Concentrated Power
In the preface of his new book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, Barry...
Tailoring Lockdowns for Developing Countries
The Covid-19 pandemic has decimated livelihoods in developing nations, and coronavirus-related deaths are rising in Africa and South Asia at an alarming...
When and How the US Should Reopen Is a Matter of Politics, Trust in Institutions and Media, Survey Says
A new survey from the Rustandy Center and the Poverty Lab at the University of Chicago finds that political party affiliation and...
After the Lockdown: Italian Consumers Are Cautious About Returning to Normal
The effects of reopening commercial and recreational activities depend not only on legislative provisions but also on the propensity of consumers to...
Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: YouTube, Food Banks and AI
Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.
No, this isn't about financial malfeasance, and...
A New Capitalisn’t Episode: How to Exit the Covid-19 Quarantine – a Reading List
For the good of public health, it's important that we continue staying in quarantine, at least for another month or two. But eventually, we...
A New Capitalisn’t Episode: Winners and Losers in the Stimulus Bill – a Reading List
In order to combat the coronavirus, Congress has passed a $2 trillion stimulus bill that targets individuals, small businesses, and large corporations. From an...
The Case for Lockdown: in Italy’s Lombardy, It Can Reduce Covid-19 Potential Fatalities from 160,000 to 25,000
According to an analysis by Bocconi University professor Carlo Favero, the number of people infected with the coronavirus in Lombardy, Northern Italy, is 120,000, while...
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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.