economic history
How a Wave of Corporate Takeovers Ushered In the Gospel of Shareholder Value
In an excerpt from his new book, Ages of American Capitalism, economic historian Jonathan Levy explains how "financiers blew up the postwar industrial corporation...
Iowa’s “Butter-Margarine War”: T. W. Schultz’s Fight for Academic Freedom
During the Second World War, economists at Iowa State College published a pamphlet titled “Putting Dairying on a War Footing,” which would later come...
James M. Buchanan Trusted Market Mechanisms Because He Trusted Individuals
James Buchanan, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, believed that individuals were able to voluntarily devise private and market-like institutional...
What Stakeholder Capitalism Can Learn From Jensen and Meckling
Jensen and Meckling’s 1976 article is an academic classic, but heavily criticized by stakeholder capitalists for arguing that corporate structures should be designed to...
An Unusual History: A Conversation Between Two Economists About the Economics Department at the University of Chicago
In conversation with Sebastian Edwards, Arnold C. Harberger reflects on his time at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.
Editor’s note: The...
Why We Need To Re-think Friedman’s Ideas About Monopolies
Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article on the social purpose of business was a specific intervention in the debate over shareholder activism and mentions...
Are Intellectual Property Rights Neoliberal? Yes and No
Today’s global IP regime is often described by critical scholars bluntly as “neoliberal.” But in fact, the topic of intellectual property rights has been...
The Most Famous Article on the Theory of the Firm is Widely Misunderstood
Michael Jensen and William Meckling’s famous 1976 Journal of Financial Economics article has been cited nearly 100,000 times and is often regarded as a...
“Power Is Evil in Itself”: The Ordoliberal Quest for a Privilege-Free Order
The lesson from the quest of German ordoliberals for a privilege-free order from the 1930s to the 1950s is that once in motion, the...
The Most Persistent of All Zombie Ideas: That Taxing the Wealthy Is Destructive to the Economy
Economics can’t tell you what values to have. It can, however, shed light on what to expect from policy that reflects any particular set...
