Capture

Pablo Balán explains that family ties provide firms with an edge in collective action that enables them to be politically active through campaign donations, to engage in financial rent-seeking by obtaining subsidized state credit, and to bypass regulation seeking to curtail the influence of business by substituting individual contributions for corporate contributions. Scholars and advocates can benefit from a deeper understanding of organizational constraints to programmatic reform.

Accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper was recently forced to sell its government consulting business after using privileged information to help firms evade taxes. Richard Holden examines the scandal and explains why the response from the Australian Tax Office points to regulatory capture by the big 4 accounting firms.

Why ban competitive offers in the online world when they’re allowed offline? Big tech wants plain vanilla broadband pricing because it forecloses platform competition.

A decade of evidence suggests that Open Internet policies have delivered the opposite effect.

In a field experiment conducted with economists on Twitter, the authors find that users who are identifiable as white, women, and PhD students affiliated with “top-ten” universities are more likely to receive follow-backs.

In new research, David Audretsch, Christian Fisch, Chiara Franzoni, Paul P. Momtaz, and Silvio Vismara find that the decline of academic freedom over the last decade has had a deleterious impact on innovation, as measured by the quantity and quality of new patents.

In new research, Marco Grotteria, Max Miller, and S Lakshmi Naaraayanan create and analyze a dataset of more than 12,000 FARA filings to investigate the drivers and outcomes of foreign lobbying of U.S. legislators. Their findings can help inform new laws and regulations that improve government transparency and prevent the more nefarious effects of foreign lobbying.

Friedrich Hayek viewed the subject of rent-seeking not from the usual welfare economics perspective, but from a constitutional economics perspective. In a new paper,...

In new research, Şenay Ağca and Deniz Igan use the shock of the September 11 attacks and declaration of war on Afghanistan to show...

Is the revolving door of top regulators one of the reasons for a lack of good regulation? Based on her recent research, Elise Brezis...