The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The fare increase on public transport that sparked the protests was only the final straw.
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How the “Watergate Babies” Released the Beast of Monopoly Upon America
Why did Washington respond to the 2008 financial crisis by pushing even more wealth and power into the hands of the same people that caused it? The answer is partly rooted in the legacy of the angry young Democrats who entered Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal and unwittingly loosened the chains of concentrated corporate power.
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Banning Noncompete Agreements Benefits Low-Wage Workers
Examining the effects of a 2008 ban on noncompete agreements for low-wage workers in Oregon, a recent paper finds that the ban increased average hourly workers’ wages by up to 6 percent.
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Companies Are More Effective Than the White House in Stopping Whistleblowers
Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes tested the “integrity hotlines” companies are supposed to have to let employees report misconduct. In many cases, they do not work or do not protect whistleblowers’ anonymity, despite Sarbanes-Oxley prescriptions.
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The Lousy Job Economy: Young People Bear the Brunt of a Long-Term Decline in American Job Quality
A new study finds a steady decline in the quality of American jobs between 1979 to 2017, even as GDP has grown. This decline has been particularly severe for young workers and catastrophic for young workers without a college degree.
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Fighting Poverty With Field Experiments: the Nobel Laureates’ Revolution
As a student, Harvard Business School professor Vincent Pons decided to become an economist after a project in Morocco with Esther Duflo. The co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics popularized a new research method based on scientific rigor but also human contact and listening.
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Esther Duflo: How to Find the Right Questions
In this piece, originally published in 2011 by the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, Esther Duflo, co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, reflects on her academic career.
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What’s Really at Stake in Poland’s Elections: Nativists Want to Impose a New, Anti-Liberal Notion of Normalcy
Religion is the new priority for anti-liberal, anti-free-trade populist parties in Europe. A victory by Poland’s nativist Law and Justice (PiS) party will pose a host of unpredictable challenges for the EU.
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The Good News: Fewer Americans Were Exposed to Fake News in 2018. The Bad News: This Probably Won’t Last
As it turns out, a majority of the American public is not bad at identifying disinformation. But as the 2020 election nears, the online disinformation problem isn’t even close to being resolved.
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Economics’ Lack of Interest in Gender Proves: the “Dismal Science” Really Is Dismal
Economists are still in the dark about the role of gender. For economics to be credible, we have to recognize that our knowledge is incomplete and learn from the diversity of humanity and experiences in our own profession.
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Uber and the Sherlock Holmes Principle: How Control of Data Can Lead to Biased Academic Research
How can we ensure that academic journals do not become an unintended instrument in the PR efforts of powerful firms? Luigi Zingales offers some solutions.
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Aaron Director and the Empirical Foundation for the Chicago Attitude on Antitrust
Empirical evidence, not just disembodied theory, was an important building block of Director’s view that competition could defeat concentration, writes Daniel Kuehn.
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