After decades of approaching antitrust through purely economic analyses, are economists once again willing to take into account political considerations as well?
Read more
Wells Fargo and the Failure of Boards and Regulators
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.
Read more
I Was a Whistleblower. The Fed Is Not Doing Enough to Fix Wall Street’s Culture of Fear
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.
Read more
How Many Newt Gingrich’s Are There in Washington? Much More Than You Might Think
As more and more lobbyists move to consulting and PR agencies, experts say the underworld of hidden lobbying is probably much bigger than what formal disclosures and registries reveal.
Read more
Richard Posner: “The Real Corruption Is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich”
In a keynote interview during the Stigler Center’s conference on concentration in America, Judge Posner said: “You are not going to have people competing with the Koch brothers.” On antitrust, Posner said: “Antitrust is dead, isn’t it?”
Read more
Conference: Is There a Concentration Problem in America?
On March 27-29, the Stigler Center will host a first-of-its-kind, three-day conference on the question of concentration in the U.S. economy that will bring together top economists, policymakers, regulators, journalists, and public intellectuals.
Read more
Does Regulation Build Trust or Entrench Cliques? Lessons From Merchant Guilds and the Taxi Industry
Close-knit networks, like guilds and taxi associations, are helpful in enhancing trust and reliability. Yet they can also become exclusive and rent-seeking.
Read more
Uber, the Mayor’s Private Email, and the Underground Lobbying Complex
The recent revelations regarding the interactions between Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Uber executive and Obama adviser David Plouffe suggest that the real action in the U.S. lobbying game takes place under the surface. The billions of dollars invested in lobbying every year, and the thousands of registered lobbyists, are only the tip of the influence-peddling iceberg.
Read more
“Under President Trump and the Republican Congress, Banks Will Have Even More Ability to Write Regulations That Favor Them”
In this installment of ProMarket’s new interview series on the economic theory of the firm, we ask University of Connecticut law professor and blogger James Kwak if the existing theory should be modified. “Corporations tend to favor policies that allow greater concentration and reduce constraints on their behavior.”
Read more
Interview Series: How Incomplete is the Theory of the Firm? Q&A with Daniel Carpenter
Should the economic theory of the firm be modified? If so, how? In March, the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Oxford University will organize a conference to answer these questions and more. Ahead of the conference, we are launching an interview series with influential scholars in the field. In the first installment, Daniel Carpenter of Harvard University answers our questions: “the profitability and survival prospects of many firms in the coming years will depend heavily, in a polarized environment, on the political skills of managers.”
Read more
“In a System with Dominance, There is Built-In Resistance to Change”: ProMarket Interviews Bernard Yeung, Part 2
In the second part of his interview with ProMarket, Bernard Yeung—one of the economists who laid the foundations of scientific research on economic power concentration—discusses free trade, the connection between wealth and power, and why governments may actually prefer markets controlled by dominant players rather than by many competitors.
Read more
Executive Orders, Judicial Orders, and the Rule of Law
What does President Trump’s executive order on immigration and its aftermath mean for the rule of law?
Read more