small business

Modernizing the IRS Presents an Opportunity To Level the Economic Playing Field

Corporate America makes sport of gaming the tax authorities, especially after decades of budget cuts to the IRS. What dominant corporations make by hiring expensive tax and lobby teams to distort the rules in their favor, smaller businesses, workers, and the general public are forced to cover with higher taxes and worsened services. Competition shouldn’t hinge on who has more pull over the tax rules and how they’re enforced. Decisions made over the next year to modernize the IRS present a historic opportunity to shape a less entrenched and more competitive economy, writes Niko Lusiani.

Researchers Find Reduced Competition After Pandemic

The chart of the week comes from a new research paper that documents the increase in small business closures during the Covid...

How to Save 40 percent of the Payroll Protection Program’s Costs

Thanks to the loan program part of the CARES Act, small businesses can receive up to 2.5 times their monthly payroll, regardless of how much...

Financial Trust Index, Covid-Edition: The CDC Is the Most Trusted Institution in America

A special wave of the Booth/Kellogg Financial Trust Index shows a high level of compliance with social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders. Approximately 45...

How to Avoid a Mass of Business Bankruptcies: Two Policy Proposals

Existing fiscal and monetary policies are powerless to restore firms’ revenues during this health emergency. Many firms will soon begin having trouble meeting their...

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...

This Is Not a Financial Crisis, So Why Should We Bailout Wall Street (Again)?

Republican and Democratic Senators reached a deal on a $2 trillion bill to help businesses and people hit by the coronavirus outbreak. But the...

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...

LATEST NEWS

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.

Why the Kroger-Albertsons Merger Is a Mess for Consumers

Grocers Kroger and Albertsons want to merge, which would make them the second biggest retail food chain and, according to them, enhance their ability to compete with Walmart and Costco and offer lower prices to consumers. Christine P. Bartholomew writes that the promises of more competition and lower prices for consumers are unlikely to manifest, and thus the Federal Trade Commission should block the deal.  

After Neoliberalism

The following is an excerpt from Martin Daunton's new book, "The Economic Government of the World: 1933-2023," out November 14.