Are anti-corruption reforms effective in reducing economic rent seeking and constraining the influence of special interests? New research from Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance finds that anti-corruption investigations in China are associated with credit reallocation from less productive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to more productive non-SOEs. The series of investigations constitute staggered events to identify the causal impact of anti-corruption reforms on bank financing.
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Much government regulation does not fit the logic of Stigler’s theory of anti-competitive regulatory capture. In a new book, Steven Vogel of Berkeley argues that the theory of regulation needs to account for the phenomenon of captured regulators bent on deregulating—and that the critical consideration facing regulators is no longer how to enhance competition, but how different governance models favor different actors.
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A whistleblower alleges fraud in the audits of Silicon Valley companies; AT&T acknowledges that hiring Michael Cohen was a “bad mistake”; new analysis finds that Amazon has not been consistent with the stated selection criteria for HQ2; and a majority of Americans back a constitutional amendment that would outlaw Citizens United. This week in political economy.
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If, as California political legend Jesse M. Unruh once quipped, “money is the mother’s milk of politicians,” it’s reasonable to expect that countries might wield their financial power for geopolitical purposes on the world stage. Accordingly, a fascinating new paper slated to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference tracks how China punishes countries whose heads of state accept meetings with the Dalai Lama by curbing bilateral lending flows from its state banks.
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George Mason University faces controversy over its relationship with donors; the former CEO of Volkswagen is charged in relation to the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal; and are Google and Facebook already trying to undermine Europe’s new privacy rules?
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A new paper by Thomas Piketty finds that major parties on both sides of the political spectrum have been captured by elites and warns of a future political system that pits “globalists” against “nativists.”
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Why has Facebook’s scandal not dented its earnings? How much are states and local governments giving to corporations in economic-development incentives? And did CFPB head Mick Mulvaney really say “the swampiest thing ever”?
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This week in political economy.
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A new Stigler Center working paper examines a more roundabout way that companies can influence legislators: by donating money to charities in lawmakers’ districts. The authors find that the magnitude of these tax-exempt charitable flows dwarfs what firms spend in PACs.
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This column on the “gun-control paradox”—the fact that gun regulations continually fail in the US Congress despite being supported by around 90 percent of US citizens—appeared in 2013 on VoxEU.org after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and was republished in 2017 after the Las Vegas mass shooting. Following the Parkland mass shooting, we are republishing it with a new preface by one of the coauthors.
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This week in political economy.
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It doesn’t involve a high-profile American billionaire, and yet of the two cases on which the police recommended indicting Israel’s prime minister, “Case 2000” is far more important and severe.
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