Research

In new research, Ryan Stones revisits the alleged disagreement between two influential schools of antitrust on how to handle big businesses. Instead of finding contrasting policy recommendations, he highlights a strikingly similar relaxation of attitudes toward enforcement in the Chicago School and Ordoliberalism in the post-war period.

Many asset managers have stopped offering funds supporting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in the face of political backlash. In new research, Omar Vasquez Duque shows that much of this backlash is due to semantics and poor fund design, and that investors across the political spectrum are willing to take lower financial returns to support specific goals under the ESG label.

In 2021, a regulatory shift by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission expanded shareholder proposals on environment and social issues from mere company...

Large asset managers increasingly control voting rights on behalf of investors, raising questions about ideological alignment in corporate governance. Pablo Montagnes, Zac Peskowitz, and...

The 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for “studies of how institutions are...

A new study by Utpal Bhattacharya, Tse-Chun Lin, and Janghoon Shon finds that Hong Kong's 2020 National Security Law led local financial analysts to...

New research from Carlo Medici shows how mass immigration to the United States in the early 20th century spurred union growth. Labor unions have long...

New research from Christopher Stewart, John Kepler, and Charles McClure shows that thousands of large mergers and acquisitions bypass antitrust review because current regulatory thresholds ignore intangible assets like intellectual property and customer data. These unreported deals, particularly in tech and pharma sectors, show signs of being more anticompetitive - with higher premiums paid, increased market power for acquirers, and evidence of "killer acquisitions" in pharmaceuticals.

In new research, William Christopher Gerken, Steven Irlbeck, Marcus Painter and Guangli Zhang track the movements of Securities and Exchange Commission-associated smartphone devices to shed light on the SEC’s investigatory process and understand how office visits from its staff alter firm behavior and outcomes.

This research note employs the quantitative approach developed by Francesco Trebbi, Miao Ben Zhang, and Michael Simkovic (2023) to provide a descriptive overview of the main differences in costs of regulatory compliance across U.S. states for the year 2014 and over the period 2002-2014. These descriptive stylized facts can be useful in grounding extant discussion on regulatory compliance burden across different U.S. regions and over time and presents both unconditional results and results controlling for state industry composition.