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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 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 away from...
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The Real Dish on the T-Mobile/Sprint Merger: A Disastrous Deal From the Start

Antitrust and Competition Melody Wang and 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 merger will...
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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 only issue...
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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 their history...
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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 encourage adversarial...
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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 lot from...
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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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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 and academia....
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Biden Embraces Buy America, Doubles Down on Trade Protection

Industrial Policy Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Megan Hogan
Industrial policy was once so out of fashion that it was jokingly called “the policy that shall not be named.” Now it’s back in...
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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 wrote that...
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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 advice to...
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The Best Political Economy Books of 2021

Antitrust and Competition Asher Schechter
A scholarly examination of market’s power toll on American workers, the collected works of a pioneering economic thinker, an ambitious narrative of US economic...
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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 of the...
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How the FTC Protected the Market Power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers

Antitrust and Competition Stacy Mitchell and Zach Freed
Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) were established in the 1960s to control drug costs but have since morphed into one of the most highly concentrated...
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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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What Economists Mean When They Say “Consumer Welfare Standard”

Antitrust and Competition Leah Samuel and Fiona Scott Morton
Though coined by academic economists, the term “consumer welfare standard” has been captured and changed by the economic school of thought known as the...
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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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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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The publication of the Stigler Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

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.