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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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What does President Trump’s executive order on immigration and its aftermath mean for the rule of law?
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A new study argues that the Federal Reserve could have saved Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy, but chose not to, partly because of political pressures.
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The financial crisis—and the limits of our regulatory response to the crash—offer important lessons for our broader understandings of how to conceptualize and institutionalize economic governance in an era of economic and political inequality.
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Ben-Artzi: “The problem is not that you have misbehavior on Wall Street. It’s that you have misbehavior by the people who are supposed to enforce the law, by the prosecutors, by the regulators.”
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“Identity politics” perceived as favoritism may be the explanation for why Trump’s strategy of accusing the political elite and Hillary Clinton of corruption paid off so well among the white working class.
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In the past four years, China has been waging the biggest anticorruption campaign in its modern history. Is it working?
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Read an excerpt from Luigi Zingales’ 2014 book Europe or Not.
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Columbia professor Richard R. John explains the history of U.S. monopolies and why antimonopoly should not be conflated with antitrust.
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