Tesla

Elon Musk Wants to Get Paid. He Will Get His 2019 Bonus Thanks to an Accounting Magic

In March 2018, Tesla’s Board of Directors granted Musk a potential bonus of 20,264,042 stock option awards under a  plan that uses “adjusted EBITDA” as one...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Tesla Special Edition

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.        Today's reading list is—what else?—a Tesla special. There’s...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Bezos’ Phone, Musk Vs Short Sellers, and Boris Johnson

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.  Who, us? Kill dissidents? Hack phones? Nooooo,...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Pension Crisis, Narcissism, and Craziness

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.      OK, OK. I know I’m admittedly obsessed...

Bethany McLean's Weekend Reading List: the SEC, Tesla, and California's Housing Crisis

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.    One of my ongoing obsessions is the...

Bethany McLean's Weekend Reading List: Pension Problems, Funky Accounting, and Elon Musk

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean  My three picks this week deal with...

SolarCity’s Troubles Fuel the Religious War Around Tesla’s Future and Elon Musk

Musk has been saying for years that his solar business will be similar in size to Tesla’s car business, but this is not likely to...

Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (August 5–11)

Monsanto loses landmark Roundup case; the Sinclair-Tribune merger blows up; Facebook wants your financial data; the historical legacy of the 2008 financial crisis; and...

LATEST NEWS

Do Wealth Taxes Significantly Curb Wealth Inequality?

Politicians and governments in the United States and elsewhere have recently proposed or implemented wealth taxes to supplement revenue and reduce wealth inequality. In a new study, Samira Marti, Isabel Z. Martínez, and Florian Scheuer show how decreases in wealth taxes led to increases in wealth inequality in Switzerland, though they find that these decreases alone are not enough to explain the magnitude of widening disparities.

Merged Firms Offer Less Product Variety

In new research, Enghin Atalay, Alan Sorensen, Christopher Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu find that mergers and acquisitions often lead to the merged firm offering less product variety than when the two firms operated pre-merger.

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.

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.

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.