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Who Is to Blame for the 2008 Financial Crisis?

Regulatory Capture Luigi Zingales
The IGM Center at the University of Chicago has asked its American and European economist panel to rate the main causes of the financial...
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Meet the Sugar Barons Who Used Both Sides of American Politics to Get Billions in Subsidies

Regulatory Capture Guy Rolnik
Meet the Florida-based Fanjul brothers, who inject money to both political parties and dominate an industry that enjoys billions of dollar's worth of subsidies and protections.  Last week,...
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The Real Dish on the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger: A Disastrous Deal From the Start

Antitrust and Competition Melody Wang, Fiona Scott Morton
The Trump-era DOJ’s decision to allow the T-Mobile/Sprint merger will go down as one of the worst merger-enforcement mistakes in decades. This...
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Congress Is Leaning Towards a Big Tech Breakup

Antitrust and Competition Hal Singer
The dominant platforms have proven themselves to be ungovernable. Behavioral remedies, especially those that require continuous oversight, might be pushed aside. The...
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The Complicated Legacy of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile

Economic History Daniel Matamala
How did a group of Chicago-trained economists manage to turn Chile into the cradle of neoliberalism? As the country aims to move...
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Tech Monopolies Are the Reason the US Now Has a TikTok Problem

Antitrust and Competition Lucas Kunce
Tech platforms like Facebook say we should protect, empower, and celebrate their concentrated power for the sake of America’s national security. But...
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Seize the Means of Computation

Antitrust and Competition Cory Doctorow
To regain internet autonomy from Big Tech companies, lower switching costs with legislation that allows new services to subvert network effects and...
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The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don’t

Antitrust and Competition Matt Stoller
According to the 18th-century French banker and philosopher Richard Cantillon, who benefits when the state prints money is based on its institutional setup. In...
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What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Milton Friedman

News Alex Edmans
Instead of ridiculing the Friedman doctrine and proclaiming its death, advocates of stakeholder capitalism and responsible investing, like me, can learn a...
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Friedman’s Principle, 50 Years Later

Luigi Zingales
In the mid-1980s, Milton Friedman’s view that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits became dominant in business...
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“Doubt is Their Product”: The Difference Between Research and Academic Lobbying

Academic Capture Tommaso Valletti
Tommaso Valletti, the former Chief Competition Economist of the European Commission, reflects on the intersection of academic economics and policymaking and offers...
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Google and Facebook’s “Kill Zone”: “We've Taken the Focus Off of Rewarding Genius and Innovation to Rewarding Capital and Scale”

Antitrust and Competition Asher Schechter
A Stigler Center panel explores the implications of tech giants’ dominance on innovation and startups. Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin joined a growing...
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eBook: Milton Friedman 50 Years Later, a Reevaluation

Commentary ProMarket writers
Over the past couple of months, ProMarket has hosted a lively debate on whether Milton Friedman was right or wrong when he...
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There Is a Direct Line from Milton Friedman to Donald Trump’s Assault on Democracy

Money in Politics Martin Wolf
Milton Friedman believed that corporations have a social responsibility to play within the rules of the game. But corporations aren’t just players...
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How the FTC Protected the Market Power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Antitrust and Competition Stacy Mitchell, Zach Freed
Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) were established in the 1960s to control drug costs but have since morphed into one of the most...
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Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives

Academic Capture Hubert Horan
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...
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The Best Political Economy Books of 2019

Academic Capture Asher Schechter
A history of American antimonopoly, the case against Big Tech, and how Europe got better than the US at free markets: here are (in no...
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Here’s How Covid-19 Is Boosting Monopolization and Market Power

Antitrust and Competition Matt Stoller
Monopolization and consolidation can happen for what seem to be good, or least necessary, reasons. How we respond as a society depends...
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The Cost of America’s Oligopoly Problem

Antitrust and Competition Asher Schechter
An innovative new study finds substantial, increasing deadweight losses resulting from oligopolistic behavior and points to the important role that startup acquisitions—particularly by large...
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With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other

Commentary Branko Milanovic
Capitalism’s global victory has been achieved through two different types of capitalist systems: the liberal meritocratic capitalism that has developed incrementally in the West,...
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What Is the Meaning of Wealth?

Income Inequality Branko Milanovic
Who's richer, a person who enjoys the comfort of modern services and technologies, or the ancient kings of a millennia ago? Comparing wealth over...
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ProMarket is dedicated to discussing how competition tends to be subverted by special interests. The posts represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty. For more information, please visit ProMarket Policy.

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