At this year’s annual ASSA meeting, Stigler Center Director Luigi Zingales delivered a lecture honoring Oliver Hart, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for economics. Read the full lecture.
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How Boys Become Entrepreneurs at the Dinner Table
New research from Hans K. Hvide and Paul Oyer has uncovered some interesting facts about men who start businesses: most of them do it in the same or related industries as their fathers work in, although entrepreneurs with higher IQs are less likely to follow their dads. Ones who do pick their fathers’ industries, however, outperform competing entrepreneurs. Here, the authors examine why.
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Wondering How Your Financial Advisors Rank for Misconduct? There’s a Web App for That
A new site created by ProMarket board member Amit Seru (Stanford) and co-authors Mark Egan (Harvard) and Gregor Matvos (UT Austin) offers free data and analysis on the financial advisory industry, including rankings for each firm, county, and state in terms of financial adviser misconduct.
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Serving Shareholders Doesn’t Mean Putting Profit Above All Else
The time has come for companies, economists, and society to abandon the argument that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profits.
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Does Environmental Crime Pay?
A new Stigler Center working paper conducts a cost-benefit analysis of DuPont’s emissions of a toxic chemical dubbed C8.
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To What Extent Do Political Considerations Affect Finance?
In June, the Stigler Center brought together top academics for a conference on the impact of politics on finance. Ahead of our second annual Political Economy of Finance conference, we are seeking papers related to the interaction between politics and business.
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Turning Corporations into Democracies
The problem with encouraging firms to maximize shareholder welfare is how to prevent managers and special interests from diverting corporate resources in the name of shareholder welfare to causes that provide them, their family, or their friends with private benefits.
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Let Data Guide Legislation: Stifling Shareholders in the CHOICE Act?
In improving the current shareholder proposal process, legislators should trade the butcher knife for the scalpel.
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A Small Step for Theory, a Leap Forward in Corporate Governance
Moving from shareholder value maximization to shareholder welfare maximization may be a small step in theory, but it could trigger a leap forward in the way our corporations are run.
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Where Friedman Was Wrong
A new paper by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales argues that a company’s objective should be the maximization of shareholders’ welfare, not value.
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Eliot Spitzer: The U.S. Never Had the Will and the Ability to Hold the Most Powerful to Account
In a special interview with ProMarket, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer talks about financial regulation, regulatory capture, and antitrust. Part 1 of 2.
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How Market Power Leads to Corporate Political Influence
Neoclassical economic theory assumes that firms have no power to influence the rules of the game. A new paper by Luigi Zingales argues: This is true only in competitive product markets. When firms have market power, they will seek and obtain political influence and vice versa.
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