Capture

The following is a chapter excerpt from The Problem of Twelve: When a Few Financial Institutions Control Everything, written by John Coates and published today by Columbia Global Reports.

In new research, Nolan McCarty and Sepehr Shahshahani find that, contrary to the concerns of Neo-Brandeisians, Market et power does not correlate with political power via outsized lobbying.

With slightly more than one year until the United States presidential election, electoral campaigns are about to ramp up. These quadrennial elections, like so many others in democracies worldwide, will mobilize thousands of campaign workers who play an integral role in shaping candidates’ electoral performance. Yet, little is known about these workers and how the experience of working in a campaign shapes their professional lives. This column describes the findings from a new study on the career trajectories of campaign labor in Brazil, showing that connections forged on a campaign provide qualified workers with better employment and earnings opportunities. This article was originally published in VoxEU.

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.