Uber’s employees co-authored academic papers with brand name scholars that were then used to back the company’s PR and lobbying strategy. Published in respected journals, those articles are based on proprietary data and non-replicable analysis. Moreover, they all don’t discuss the subsidies that make it possible for Uber to pursue market dominance despite its endless losses.
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Anat Admati calls on economists and academics to engage with governance and political economy issues, scrutinize models before applying them to the real world, and enhance the positive impact of their work.
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For many years, Chile’s economic growth and transition to democracy have made it the poster boy for neoliberalism. The current wave of protests highlights the extreme inequality caused by 40 years of neoliberal policies.
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In this piece, originally published in 2011 by the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, Esther Duflo, co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, reflects on her academic career.
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Economists are still in the dark about the role of gender. For economics to be credible, we have to recognize that our knowledge is incomplete and learn from the diversity of humanity and experiences in our own profession.
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How can we ensure that academic journals do not become an unintended instrument in the PR efforts of powerful firms? Luigi Zingales offers some solutions.
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Empirical evidence, not just disembodied theory, was an important building block of Director’s view that competition could defeat concentration, writes Daniel Kuehn.
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David Henderson of the Hoover Institution defends the legacy of Aaron Director, the most enigmatic among the founders of the so-called “Chicago School.” Director, argues Henderson, was not the nihilist Matt Stoller accused him of being.
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The rise of giants like Amazon and Facebook proves the long-lasting influence of Director’s approach. His intellectual and political legacy is the transition of legitimacy from democratic institutions as the locus of governing power to private monopolies.
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An innovative new study finds substantial, increasing deadweight losses resulting from oligopolistic behavior and points to the important role that startup acquisitions—particularly by large tech firms—played in driving this trend.
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Ahead of our fourth annual Theory of the Firm conference, we are soliciting papers dedicated to the topic of academic lobbying.
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In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field.
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