Zingales

How to Restart the Economy and Save Lives: Simulations on Northern Italy

Italian officials have to choose the optimal strategy to end the lockdown. A policy that sends all the active population back to...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: The Risk Of Reopening – a Reading List

Despite warnings from government and health officials, some states are choosing to begin reopening their economies this week by ending lockdown restrictions. In this...

“Stop Looking for a Post-Covid Intellectual, We Have Found One”: Le Point Profiles Luigi Zingales

Writer and entrepreneur Mathieu Laine wrote an extensive profile of Luigi Zingales for the French magazine Le Point. They discussed the pandemic,...

A New Capitalisn’t Episode: Where Does the Money Come From? With Special Guest Eugene Fama

As Kate Waldock and Luigi Zingales predicted in a previous episode, the government is running out of money and will ask Congress for additional...

The Darkest Side of Monopsony: The South Korean Case

"Chaebols”, large business groups controlled by founder families, are usually considered a crucial ingredient of South Korea's economic miracle. But after a process of...

A Special Capitalisn’t Episode: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Economic Shutdown

One of the prominent economic debates to emerge during the coronavirus outbreak has been whether to continue with shelter-in-place measures that are hurting the...

A New Capitalisn't Episode: Did the Economists of the '60s and '70s Ruin the Economy?

Are economists to blame for our current state of affairs? That's the argument Binyamin Appelbaum makes in his book "The Economists' Hour." In this...

A Majority of Americans Don’t Trust Facebook, One Third Supports Breaking It Up

The annual Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index survey shows that 73 percent of Americans disapprove of Facebook’s policy not to fact-check political ads....

Americans Report Record Level of Trust in Banks and Big Corporations, But not in the US Government

2019 Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index increases from 27.6 percent to 33.3 percent, showing the highest level of financial trust from the American...

Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives

Uber's employees co-authored academic papers with brand name scholars that were then used to back the company's PR and lobbying strategy. Published in respected...

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.