How does the revolving door between Congress and corporate America affect the enforcement of tax policy? A new study examines how tax rates change when firms hire former members of Congress, finding that companies’ tax bills and the probability of being audited decrease markedly when they hire a former legislator.
Read more
Digital platforms present an enforcement challenge sufficiently daunting that it requires major reforms to antitrust law. But in order to restore lost competition, we need more than antitrust reform; we need better regulators. And for both, we need Congress to act.
Read more
Americans used to have a relatively egalitarian view of markets. How did they come to accept extreme inequality as an innate part of their economic system? At the heart of this change is a radical shift in the meaning of American capitalism itself.
Read more
While some markets may self-correct, rapid self-correction in markets dominated by large digital platforms is unlikely. The economy and market structure subcommittee of the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms Project proposes ways to reform antitrust law and regulation in order to adequately deliver competition to consumers.
Read more
The idiosyncrasies of the American approach to regulation have left the world’s largest economy ill-equipped to protect consumers and guide firms when it comes to policy issues surrounding digital platforms. The privacy and data protection subcommittee of the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms Project proposes three complementary approaches to protecting privacy and security interests.
Read more
Digital platforms present a new formidable threat to the news media that market forces will not correct if left to their own devices. The media subcommittee of the Stigler Center’s Digital Platforms Project proposes ways to strengthen independent, strong, and rigorous accountability journalism.
Read more
Ahead of its annual conference on Digital Platforms, Markets and Democracy, the Stigler Center formed a committee to produce independent white papers that will inform policymakers on how to address the political and economic issues raised by tech platforms. In preparation for the conference, we are publishing the executive summary of each preliminary report.
Read more
Big tech firms have been active in Washington since the early days of the Microsoft antitrust case, but in recent years they have increased their political spending, allowing us to get a sense of the scope of their influence.
Read more
Weakening competition policy in Europe risks creating monopolies rather than industrial champions.
Read more
The “consumer welfare” approach to antimonopoly is the main contributor to the extreme and dangerous concentrations of power that Americans face today. In place of this vague, subjective, easily manipulated, and fundamentally corrupt framework, we propose a system of simple rules that is true to the original American approach to building and protecting an open and democratic society.
Read more
Privacy law is currently being shaped and implemented by a new industry of third-party tech vendors. These companies code their own interpretations of privacy laws into the designs of their products, but many are doing so without legal expertise.
Read more
A new Stigler Center case study explores questions surrounding the ESRB, the self-regulatory body responsible for assigning age and content ratings to video games.
Read more