Nobel

Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart on Empowering Twitter’s Shareholders

In an interview with ProMarket, Nobel laureate Oliver Hart explains why broadening our perspective on fiduciary duty beyond maximizing shareholder wealth could...

We Need More Respectful and Inclusive Experiments in Development Economics: A Proposal

After many years of field research in Uganda, three economists outline how to prevent a powerful research tool such as randomized...

Indecent Proposals in Economics: The Moral Problem With Randomized Trial Experiments

The advent of field Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) has made it more acceptable for applied economists to collect data in developing countries....

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: The Risk Of Reopening – a Reading List

Despite warnings from government and health officials, some states are choosing to begin reopening their economies this week by ending lockdown restrictions. In this...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: Where Does the Money Come From? With Special Guest Eugene Fama

As Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales predicted in a previous episode, the government is running out of money and will ask Congress for additional...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode, Featuring Paul Krugman: A Reading List

On this episode, Kate and Luigi talk with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman about his new book Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the...

Who Benefits When State Governments Award Incentives to Politically-Connected Companies?

A new study finds that a company is nearly four times more likely to receive an economic incentive in a state where the company...

“Is the Market Actually Efficient? No, It Is Only a Very Powerful Narrative”

A conversation with Nobel Prize laureate Robert Shiller on his new book, Narrative Economics: "Economists do not study narratives systematically, but they shape the...

Fighting Poverty With Field Experiments: the Nobel Laureates' Revolution

As a student, Harvard Business School professor Vincent Pons decided to become an economist after a project in Morocco with Esther Duflo. The co-recipient...

Esther Duflo: How to Find the Right Questions

In this piece, originally published in 2011 by the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, Esther Duflo, co-recipient 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.