Regulation
The Foundation of Corporate Personhood: A Look at the Charles River Bridge Case of 1837
Some 130 years before Friedman could begin arguing that a corporation’s sole responsibility was to make a profit for its shareholders, Boston’s Charles River...
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (June 16–23)
AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner continues to make waves; a New York federal judge says the entire Consumer of Financial Protection Bureau needs to...
Was the Marketplace of Ideas “Politically Hijacked”?
A Stigler Center panel examines the influence of Big Five tech firms over political discourse and the marketplace of ideas.
At one point during Mark...
Livestreaming Polluters to Enforce Environmental Policy: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Pittsburgh
Enforcing environmental regulations is controversial and can be costly. But researchers at UCLA and Carnegie Mellon have proposed a low-cost alternative for enforcement—disclosing emissions...
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (May 19–26)
Trump signs the largest rollback of financial regulations since the 2008 crisis into law; Zuckerberg masterfully evades the questions of European parliamentarians; Amazon has...
How Politicians Intensify Financial Cycles: 300 Years of Pro-Cyclical Regulation
Three hundred years of financial regulation offer a cautionary tale to today’s push against yesterday’s regulations. This column revisits the political economy of financial...
Rethinking Stigler’s Theory of Regulation: Regulatory Capture or Deregulatory Capture?
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...
The Only Game in Town: Central Banking as False Hope
To accompany Paul Tucker’s mini-course at the Stigler Center this week, we offer here an extract of the former Bank of England Deputy Governor’s...
Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal
We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences...
Do We Need to Mandate Firms’ Reporting And Auditing?
Back in the 1960s, George Stigler called into question whether states should require firms to publicly report their financials. A recent Stigler Center working...
