Economic theory tells us that firms are more likely to exploit labor market power than product market power in the United States today. And it tells us that the government should devote more resources to labor market litigation than to product market litigation.
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Academic capture by donors threatens norms of independence and integrity at institutions of higher education, argue faculty members from Saint Louis University.
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Google skips Congressional hearing, potentially making a “strategic mistake of virtually incalculable proportions”; Jon Kyl’s “ethical baggage”; new research finds telecom companies are slowing Internet traffic to and from YouTube and Netflix; and where do economists stand on market concentration?
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The rising scholar of taxation and inequality talks to ProMarket about the problems excessive economic power poses for open political systems, how states can tackle profit-shifting, and critics who have dismissed his work on distributional issues as “a French economics.”
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Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics, a judgement mostly based on his labor theory of value. But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labor in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labor and credit markets.
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In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
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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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Top5itis is a disease that currently affects the economics discipline. It refers to the obsession of the profession of academic economists with the so-called “top5″ journals.
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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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Chicago Booth’s Luigi Zingales and George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen discuss the market power wielded by digital platforms, and how to promote competition.
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While the World Bank scrambles to contain the Doing Business rankings firestorm, a new paper by Rabia Malik and Randall Stone traces a more insidious source of partiality in how the Bank does development work.
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This week in political economy.
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