regulatory capture
Holding Up the News
Meta has silenced news organizations’ social media accounts in response to Canada’s Online News Act, a law not yet in effect. Josh Braun describes the reasoning behind such legislation, its potential flaws, and how Meta, particularly Facebook, has turned the Canadian wildfire crisis into a regulatory pressure campaign.
Family Ties as Corporate Power
Pablo Balán explains that family ties provide firms with an edge in collective action that enables them to be politically active through campaign donations, to engage in financial rent-seeking by obtaining subsidized state credit, and to bypass regulation seeking to curtail the influence of business by substituting individual contributions for corporate contributions. Scholars and advocates can benefit from a deeper understanding of organizational constraints to programmatic reform.
Australian PwC Scandal Reeks of Regulatory Capture
Accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper was recently forced to sell its government consulting business after using privileged information to help firms evade taxes. Richard Holden examines the scandal and explains why the response from the Australian Tax Office points to regulatory capture by the big 4 accounting firms.
Should We Regulate the Revolving Door of Regulators?
Is the revolving door of top regulators one of the reasons for a lack of good regulation? Based on her recent research,...
Corporate Political Responsibility in a Captured Economy
Most attention on corporate governance has focused on businesses’ social responsibility. Claudine Schneider and Ed Dolan write that businesses need to take...
Industrial Policy Is a Seductive Mirage
Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s...
2023 Antitrust and Competition Conference: Call for Papers
The Stigler Center is inviting submissions of short academic articles (up to 3000 words) focused on the development of a legal/economic...
Is Big Business Ungovernable?
Regulators should dedicate more resources to pursuing big cases against the biggest market actors, even if it means compiling far fewer enforcement...
Cultural Capture of Antitrust Is More Likely in America than Europe
Jan Broulík’s new article explores whether so-called cultural capture may develop in antitrust policies on either side of the Atlantic and what...
Are Monopolists or Cartels the True Source of Anticompetitive US Political Power?
Trade associations are often the biggest obstacles to competitive markets, especially when those organizations use their influence to change public policy in...
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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.
Antitrust and Competition
The FTC Needs To Focus Arguments on Technological Transitions After High-Profile Losses
Joshua Gray and Cristian Santesteban argue that the Federal Trade Commission's focus in Meta-Within and Microsoft-Activision on narrow markets like VR fitness apps and consoles missed the boat on the real competition issue: the threat to future competition in nascent markets like VR platforms and cloud gaming.
