Did the soaring wages in finance go in hand with a better selection of talented individuals into the sector? The evidence suggests no.
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This Is What Monopoly Looks Like: The Italian Tobacco Sector in the Late 19th Century
How does a monopolist know what prices to charge to extract the most profit? A new paper digs into the classic monopolist’s problem with a look at the tobacco monopoly in the 19th century Kingdom of Italy.
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How US Voters React to Immigration in the Voting Booth May Depend on Both Immigrants’ and Native Residents’ Skill Levels
A new working paper has revealed two strikingly divergent correlations between increases in high-skilled and low-skilled immigration and change in Republican vote share since 1994.
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Gabriel Zucman: “Some People in Economics Feel That Talking About Inequality Is Not What Economists Should Be Doing”
The rising scholar of taxation and inequality talks to ProMarket about the problems excessive economic power poses for open political systems, how states can tackle profit-shifting, and critics who have dismissed his work on distributional issues as “a French economics.”
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How China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign Is Moving Financing Away from State-Owned Enterprises
Are anti-corruption reforms effective in reducing economic rent seeking and constraining the influence of special interests? New research from Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance finds that anti-corruption investigations in China are associated with credit reallocation from less productive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to more productive non-SOEs. The series of investigations constitute staggered events to identify the causal impact of anti-corruption reforms on bank financing.
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Depositors Disciplining Banks: The Impact of Scandals
Can depositor activism make a real difference? New research set to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference examines the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy and similar events and suggests that banks see significant decreases in deposit growth after experiencing environmental, corruption, and tax evasion scandals.
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Marx and Modern Microeconomics
Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics, a judgement mostly based on his labor theory of value. But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labor in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labor and credit markets.
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Excessive Zoning Makes Us Poorer and More Unequal
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.
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Why Democracy Fails to Reduce Inequality: Blame the Brahmin Left
A new paper by Thomas Piketty finds that major parties on both sides of the political spectrum have been captured by elites and warns of a future political system that pits “globalists” against “nativists.”
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Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (April 14–April 28)
Why has Facebook’s scandal not dented its earnings? How much are states and local governments giving to corporations in economic-development incentives? And did CFPB head Mick Mulvaney really say “the swampiest thing ever”?
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Baldwin on Globalization: “A Lot of the Narrative Is Based on the US as If It Were the Whole World”
Richard Baldwin, professor of international trade at the Graduate Institute of Geneva and editor-in-chief of VoxEU.org, talks to ProMarket about the convergence between the G7 and emerging countries, the United States’ failure to build a social contract to mediate the changes of globalization, and his confidence that—rumors of trade war notwithstanding—the international trade regime is actually quite resilient.
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“Globalization Has Contributed to Tearing Societies Apart”
In an interview with ProMarket, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik explained where globalization went wrong, how trade agreements serve rent-seeking by politically well-connected firms, and why the only solution to the rise of political populism is an economic populism that reimagines the institutions of capitalism.
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