The failure of Enron and subsequent demise of Arthur Andersen led to significant changes for public reporting and auditing but not much change in the concentration of audit market power among the remaining Big Four global firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC.
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Neoclassical economic theory assumes that firms have no power to influence the rules of the game. A new paper by Luigi Zingales argues: This is true only in competitive product markets. When firms have market power, they will seek and obtain political influence and vice versa.
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The recently-released secret taping of a conversation between Brazil’s president Michel Temer and one of the country’s most prominent businessmen reveals the extent to which big business influences politics and the judiciary in Brazil.
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A new Stigler Center case study chronicling the story of Chile’s first crowdfunding platform and its early regulatory challenges illustrates how financial regulations can be effectively used by incumbents to stifle competition.
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New Stigler Center working paper: “To the extent that legislators represent majority opinion, it happens largely because legislators share the opinions of their constituents, not because legislators seek to reflect constituent opinion.”
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A new Stigler Center working paper looks into the effects of referendums and public initiatives on public policy and finds that direct democracy better represents the will of the majority, and therefore might also be better able to counteract the power of special interests over policymaking.
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Between January 2009 and December 2015, White House officials met with corporate CEOs 2,286 times. A new study, to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center conference on the political economy of finance, shows that access to the White House has several economic benefits.
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Media scholar Jonathan Taplin, author of the new book Move Fast and Break Things, on the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of digital platforms.
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A new study reveals both the potential biases in the proxy advisory industry and how a new entrant can help mitigate conflicts of interest.
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After decades of approaching antitrust through purely economic analyses, are economists once again willing to take into account political considerations as well?
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Two new reports concerning the Wells Fargo scandal suggest that the bank’s senior management, its board of directors, and the regulators all knew about the bank’s toxic practices, yet for years did nothing to stop them.
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Deutsche Bank whistleblower Eric Ben-Artzi, who publicly rejected a multimillion dollar award from the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer, writes about the failure of regulators to fix the culture that wreaked havoc on the financial system.
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