SCOTUS Forum. In this second post in our roundtable of op-eds on the Supreme Court’s June 25 Amex decision, UChicago’s Randy Picker looks at how the opinion incorporated the theory of two-sided markets and the merits of the claim that Amex’s anti-steering rules are in fact pro-competitive.
Read more
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 Bridge Company had to convince the Supreme Court that corporations were private entities whose interests could diverge from the public interest. While it lost that case, the partial success of the Charles River Bridge Company’s reasoning with the court laid the foundations for corporate personhood as it exists today.
Read more
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 be eliminated; the Koch Brothers are enlisting sophisticated data tool to fight against public transit; and which private contractors stand to benefit from the administration’s immigration policies?
Read more
A Stigler Center panel examines the influence of Big Five tech firms over political discourse and the marketplace of ideas.
Read more
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 by live-streaming videos of pollution online—and here offer some preliminary evidence on how well it works.
Read more
Trump signs the largest rollback of financial regulations since the 2008 crisis into law; Zuckerberg masterfully evades the questions of European parliamentarians; Amazon has developed a “powerful and dangerous” new facial recognition system; and why don’t health insurers mind big hospital bills?
Read more
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 crises and documents a consistent pattern of politically driven procyclical regulations. These regulatory cycles have a poor track record.
Read more
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.
Read more
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 ambitious new tome Unelected Power: The Question for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State.
Read more
We normally think of income inequality as a function of differences in class or socioeconomic status. But much more than generally realized, geographic differences are a major source of inequality as well, argue Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in this extract from their new book The Captured Economy.
Read more
Back in the 1960s, George Stigler called into question whether states should require firms to publicly report their financials. A recent Stigler Center working paper revisits this issue and measures the impact of the different levels of financial reporting and auditing mandates around Europe on resource allocation.
Read more
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.
Read more