Apple hits the coveted $1 trillion mark—thanks to share buybacks; Senator Mark Warner’s proposals to regulate social media platforms make waves; Google is reportedly planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China; and what’s behind the public battle between President Trump and the Koch brothers for control of the GOP?
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Brett Kavanaugh is expected to bring his pro-business bent to the Supreme Court; the DOJ is appealing the AT&T-Time Warner merger approval; Britain fines Facebook and the EU is expected to fine Google; and who really benefits from the GOP’s tax cuts?
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In an interview with ProMarket, Open University’s Peter Bloom talks about his provocative new book CEO Society and why he believes celebrating corporate CEOs too much erodes democratic values.
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Do star scientists erect barriers to entry for newcomers in their fields? Pierre Azoulay and Joshua Graff Zivin bring some data to the question raised in that famous quip from physicist Max Planck on how scientific progress really happens.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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