Delivering UChicago’s 532nd Convocation address, Luigi Zingales advised young graduates to embrace their power as consumers, workers, and citizens and fight corporate monopolies.
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Protecting the Independence and Integrity of Research: Introducing the Academic Capture Warning System
Inappropriate financial donor influence at institutions of higher education appears to be on the rise and risks eroding public trust in academic research. In order to defend academic freedom and institutional independence, we have decided to create a new database to document clear violations of well-accepted norms involving financial donations.
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“Economics Now Points Away From the Laissez-Faire Approach”
Columbia professor Suresh Naidu on Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, the new initiative he launched with Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman, and why he believes economics shouldn’t be conflated with neoliberalism.
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The Elephant in the Market Power Debate
Profits are the ultimate sign of market power. But for the past 40 years, economists and antitrust practitioners have disparaged the measurement of profit margins as unreliable. That needs to change, and new scholarship showing rising margins across the economy is leading the way.
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Market Power or Just Scale Economies?
While increased economies of scale may offer a partial explanation for higher margins and declining dynamism in the US economy, growing market power provides a better explanation, argues Jonathan Baker.
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (December 9-16)
Congress misses an opportunity to scrutinize Google; the IRS is on life support; Johnson & Johnson reportedly knew for decades that its baby powder contained asbestos; the British Labour Party considers a break-up of the Big Four accounting firms; and will Obamacare once again be upheld by the Supreme Court?
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“US Regulators Have Essentially Become Do-Nothing Institutions”
In an interview with ProMarket, Jonathan Tepper talks about the rise of America’s oligopoly problem, why he believes antimonopoly is not a left-right issue, and how a passionate fan of free markets came to write a book titled “The Myth of Capitalism.”
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Why the FTC Should Focus on Labor Monopsony
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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Pursuers of Truth or Peddlers of Influence?
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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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (September 1–7)
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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Gabriel Zucman: “Some People in Economics Feel That Talking About Inequality Is Not What Economists Should Be Doing”
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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Marx and Modern Microeconomics
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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