Race
Discrimination in the Formation of Academic Networks at #EconTwitter
In a field experiment conducted with economists on Twitter, the authors find that users who are identifiable as white, women, and PhD students affiliated with “top-ten” universities are more likely to receive follow-backs.
Race and the Consumer Welfare Standard
The consumer welfare standard employs a collective consumer in its model when evaluating possibly anticompetitive behavior. This aggregated approach fails to recognize...
To Build an Equitable Economy, We Must Understand Capitalism’s Racist Heritage
American capitalism was built on racial exploitation, from the enslavement of Black people to institutionalized discrimination and its structural impact on our...
More than Economics, Ideology Determines US Voters’ Preferences for Redistribution
The US stands out among developed economies for its comparatively low level of redistribution as a percentage of GDP. Gustavo de Souza...
How Sadie Alexander, the First Black Economics PhD, Became a Voice for Black Workers
A whole century has passed since Sadie Alexander became the first African American to receive a PhD in economics in the United...
Three Ways Tax Policies Increase the Black-White Racial Wealth Gap
Dorothy Brown, the author of The Whiteness of Wealth, explains how tax breaks for marriage, college, and gifts and inheritance contribute to...
Covid-19 Aggravates Existing Income, Gender, and Race Inequalities, and Further Increases Political Divisions
Seventy percent of Americans know someone who tested positive; one in five know someone who died from coronavirus, survey shows.
Strength in Numbers: Using Data to Track Diversity and Inclusion
Recent protests against racism and police brutality, along with the #MeToo movement, have increased pressure on businesses to measure and improve their...
Do the Sons of Rich Families Recover After a Large Wealth Shock? Evidence From the US Civil War
One striking feature of many underdeveloped societies is that economic power is concentrated in the hands of very small powerful elites. Why is it...
LATEST NEWS
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.
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.
