Trump

How to Save American Middle-Sized Businesses from the Coronavirus Supply-Chain Crisis

Congress passed an $8.3 billion spending bill to address the coronavirus epidemic, but the bill will not protect small companies. Republican Senator Marco Rubio put forward...

Bethany McLean’s Weekend Reading List: Coronavirus Special Issue

Corruption, lobbying, corporate malfeasance, and frauds: a weekly unconventional selection of must-read articles by investigative journalist Bethany McLean.  This is by far my favorite headline of...

American Oligarch: Michael Bloomberg Reveals His One Remaining Path to the Democratic Nomination

Michael Bloomberg's only real path to the nomination was always a contested convention, where he could be able to further leverage his wealth and...

Paul Krugman on the Economic Impact of Coronavirus: “We Are Very Vulnerable, This Could Be Pretty Bad”

A sneak video preview of next week's episode of Capitalisn't, the podcast hosted by Luigi Zingales and Kate Waldock, in which Nobel Prize-winning economist...

Paul Krugman on the Economic Impact of Coronavirus: "We Are Very Vulnerable, This Could Be Pretty Bad"

A sneak video preview of next week's episode of Capitalisn't, the podcast hosted by Luigi Zingales and Kate Waldock, in which Nobel Prize-winning economist...

Who Won the South Carolina Democratic Debate? The ProMarket Panel's Analysis

Is Bernie Sanders inevitable, and is Michael Bloomberg doomed? Which candidate would be best suited to avoid a recession in the US? A ProMarket...

The Most Persistent of All Zombie Ideas: That Taxing the Wealthy Is Destructive to the Economy

Economics can’t tell you what values to have. It can, however, shed light on what to expect from policy that reflects any particular set...

The Trump Administration Attacks the Stigler Report on Digital Platforms

President Trump’s 2020 Economic Report finally confronts the issue of antitrust enforcement both in the traditional economy and in the digital one....

How to Choose a President: The Electoral College and an Argument Whose Time Has Gone

Two of the three presidents in this century, George Bush and Donald Trump, initially won office by coming in second in the popular vote. The...

Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren: The Real Impact of Democratic Candidates' Tax Plans

According to UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, all of the Democratic candidates' plans increase tax rates on the rich but to...

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.