In Chapter 5 of the forthcoming Stigler Center ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, published in anticipation of the eponymous conference at Chicago Booth on April 19 and 20, ProMarket editor Guy Rolnik and coauthors give an overview of the challenges facing the regulators of tech giants today.
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What accounts for the difference in contemporary EU and US antitrust doctrine? Examined closely, says William E. Kovacic in Chapter 4 of our forthcoming Digital Platforms and Concentration ebook, the DNA of modern US antitrust doctrine is a double helix, with one strand coming from the Chicago School and a second strand from the modern Harvard school.
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What are the bases of the digital platforms’ power? In Chapter 3 of our Digital Platforms and Concentration ebook in advance of this month’s blockbuster antitrust conference at Chicago Booth, Lina M. Khan points to the gatekeeper power, leveraging power, and information exploitation power of America’s tech giants.
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The European Commission’s 2001 decision to stop GE’s acquisition of Honeywell might be the most famous of its several decisions to interfere in mergers of US companies, and has prompted some observers to accuse it of seeking to protect European firms from competition. So what do the data say on the subject?
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In Chapter 2 of the ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, forthcoming ahead of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference on April 19 and 20, Justus Haucap of Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf examines the distinctiveness of how Germany does antitrust for big tech, with specific looks at its current investigations of Google Shopping and Facebook and how useful data portability could really be.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik explained where globalization went wrong, how trade agreements serve rent-seeking by politically well-connected firms, and why the only solution to the rise of political populism is an economic populism that reimagines the institutions of capitalism.
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In this chapter from the forthcoming Stigler Center ebook Digital Platforms and Concentration, published in anticipation of the eponymous conference at Chicago Booth on April 19 and 20, Ezrachi and Stucke consider how leading digital platforms and data-opolies distort the online environment for private gain at the expense of the common good.
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Early childcare can be a major contributor to eliminating inequality of opportunity and even lay the foundations for a more productive workforce in the future.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Facebook early investor Roger McNamee talks about his efforts to get Facebook to fix its business model and the moment he realized the social media giant is unwilling to change.
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In a famous essay published in 1990 the economist Amartya Sen explored the drivers of the global sex ratio imbalance, what he called the problem of “missing women.” A new CEPR discussion paper revisits this question and traces variation in sex ratios in India to changes in the price of gold, used for bridal dowries.
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This week in political economy.
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The European Economic Association has announced that this year’s Hicks Tinbergen medal will go to ProMarket editor and Stigler Center faculty director Luigi Zingales and his coauthors Luigi Guiso and Paola Sapienza for their 2016 paper “Long-Term Persistence.” Here, a current coauthor of Sapienza and Zingales credits the prizewinners with helping to make the study of informal institutions mainstream in economics.
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