spectrum

Spectrum Auctions: There Is Elegance in the Mundane

As a student, Booth School Professor Anthony Lee Zhang was puzzled that Paul Milgrom chose to spend so much of his time...

When Scholarship Turns Into Business: Stefano Feltri Responds to Paul Milgrom

Stefano Feltri responds to Paul Milgrom’s criticisms of his recent ProMarket piece on the 2017 FCC spectrum auction.

Should We Leave Public Resource Allocation to the Experts? Glen Weyl Responds to Paul Milgrom

Glen Weyl, Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer Political Economist and Social Technologist, responds to Paul Milgrom’s criticisms of his recent...

Was the 2017 FCC Spectrum Auction a Success—or a Disappointing Failure?

In a post published on his company’s website, Stanford professor Paul Milgrom responded to the recent ProMarket pieces by Glen Weyl and...

How Market Design Economists Helped Engineer a Mass Privatization of Public Resources

In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission conducted a complex two-sided auction to reallocate spectrum from broadcasters to mobile communications companies. The way...

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.